


The Unmaking of a Boy Named Changkyun

by andnowforyaya



Category: EXO (Band), Monsta X (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Robots & Androids, Changkyun is a cat dad, Cyborgs, M/M, Science Fiction, Unethical Experimentation
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-09-08
Updated: 2019-01-20
Packaged: 2019-07-08 17:59:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 13
Words: 38,995
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15935465
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/andnowforyaya/pseuds/andnowforyaya
Summary: Changkyun takes on all kinds of contracts to make ends meet -- chasing down rogue Bots, picking up and delivering packages, scrapping for parts. It's all in a day's work. But one morning, he gets a call to take on a contract that may put him in a little over his own head.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [xocberry](https://archiveofourown.org/users/xocberry/gifts).



> thank you for the prompts~ i may have spiraled out of control ^^' so, um, let me know if you're not satisfied with it please

“The contract was for 5,000 units,” Changkyun points out, when the completed transaction lights up in bright green text in the corner of his right eye, the lens he’s wearing projecting a steady stream of updates that he’s subscribed to in the foreground of his sight against the backdrop of the rest of the world.

CONTRACT 0001661

     +3500 UNITS

DELAYS ON 4 LINE

     25 MINUTES

REMINDERS:

     RENT DUE IN TWO DAYS

     MISSED CALL FROM MINHYUK

     FEED PRINCESS

The stream regurgitates the updates every few minutes, replacing old news and messages with new ones. He blinks, clearing away the stream to focus on the woman in front of him clad in a body-hugging mini-dress, thigh-high black leather boots, and a spiked collar around her neck. Her neon pink hair is tied up in a ponytail that cascades down her back. Bora stands behind the counter between them with her hands pressed flat against the surface and stares Changkyun down, unimpressed. The name of her company flashes across the front of the counter: YOON AND KIM SECURITIES. Behind her, a flat-screen displays contracts that have been completed, their status highlighted across the screen in glaring red letters.  

“The contract was for a whole Bot, I.M. Not its leftovers after it looks like it was shoved through a meat grinder.”

Changkyun shrugs. “I salvaged what I could.”

“And I paid you what I could,” Bora snaps, waving Changkyun away with a well-manicured hand and looking over Changkyun’s shoulder. “Respect the specs, I.M. Next!”

Grumbling, Changkyun shuffles away, hiking his bag onto his right shoulder and rolling the other one experimentally. It’s stiff and slow to respond. Underneath the torn fabric of his shirt there, the wires connecting his robotic arm to the tendons and ligaments of his shoulder are nearly severed and surely burnt. The Bot Changkyun had chased down had been equipped with some arsenal, which was to be expected, but Changkyun had gotten sloppy. His arm had been clipped by a bullet in close-quartered, hand-to-hand grappling, and he was lucky it hadn’t been shot right off completely. The repairs for his stupid arm alone will cost nearly 3,000 units, giving him a measly profit of only 500 from the hit.

Well, he can always bully Minhyuk into calling Hoseok over to take a look and patch him up, instead. That usually only costs him the price of a few packages of convenience store ramen.

He exits the office filled with desks stationed by agents processing contracts in front of disgruntled contract workers and walks down the hall to the elevator. Yoon and Kim Securities operates out of a tall, silver building in the Finance District downtown. The floor above is an agency specializing in helping rich people buy real estate off-planet, and the floor below is a massage parlor filled with Companions who cater to the same rich people’s perverse fantasies and whims in the parlor’s dark private rooms. He takes the elevator down to the street and fits his mask over his face before he leaves the building.

The air outside is hazy and dry. It’s mid-morning, but the sun seems very, very far away, its light barely breaking through the haze and thick cloud of smog hanging over the city. Changkyun turns right outside of the building before remembering that there are delays on the 4 line, backtracks, and chooses to go in the other direction. 

-x-

It doesn’t escape him that it isn’t a very dignified thing for a bounty hunter to ride the bus home, yet here he is, sandwiched in the seats near the front of the bus that are meant for the elderly or the disabled, between a man who smells like ripe cheese and a woman who has sneezed so many times into her hand that Changkyun can see her palm glistening. He tries to roll his shoulder again but his arm just hangs limply at his side instead, so he hugs his bag in his lap with one arm, protecting his collection of knives and weapons inside the bag from every pothole and sharp turn the bus manages to make in the sluggish, oozing inner-city traffic.

The bus lines are a relic of the past. Slow and creaking and old, the electric buses run along wired routes at the street level, dropping passengers off at transportation hubs that have seen better days. Changkyun gets off after five stops, entering the transportation hub at Canal Street. He stops at one of the vendors to buy a couple of steamed pork buns before getting onto one of the moving sidewalks in the hub that will take him directly to the Q Line.

On the train platform, more vendors hawk their goods from booths lining the walls, menus and descriptions for their wares or goods flashing in the glass screens over their heads, the languages of the signs alternating from English to Chinese to French. At the far end of the platform, Changkyun, munching slowly on one of his buns, pauses before one vendor.

“Young man,” the old lady behind the counter at this stall says in a thick yet tremulous voice, “Are you interested in charms?”

“Not particularly,” Changkyun says, though he still reaches out to brush his fingers over the small charms laid out carefully across the black fabric draped over the counter. They are charms woven out of bright red ribbon, some of them with green jade stones or tiny gold coins set within them. The ends of the charms drip with red tassels, fine and silky. He picks one up. The whole charm is no bigger than his pinky finger.

“For your sweetheart, then,” the old lady suggests. Her silver hair is wrapped in a low bun at the base of her neck, her skin reminding Changkyun of the folds and wrinkles of a bulldog. But she smiles at Changkyun, unburdened and pure. “Or perhaps your mother?”

“Haven’t got any of those,” Changkyun mutters. Still, the charm is pretty, and looks nice in the palm of his hand. Plus, he just got paid. He says, “I’ll take it. How much?”

“Don’t got a sweetheart or a mother? How sad. I’ll give you a discount. 30 units.”

“You’re ripping me off.”

“I made these by hand.” She smiles again, showing Changkyun her hands, which are leathery with age. “25.”

“20,” Changkyun barters, and the Q train whistles into the station. “Take it or leave it.”

“Very well,” she says with a sigh. Changkyun holds out his hand, allowing her to scan his watch. He sees the completed transaction in the corner of his eye just as he hears the doors open to the train behind him. He thanks her, and turns to go. “Red is for good luck,” he hears the old lady say as he pockets the charm. “And for protection.”

-x-

By the time Changkyun reaches his shoebox of an apartment on the Upper East Side, his left arm is completely unresponsive. He waves with his right to a couple of his neighbors and the squatters lingering in his hallway as he makes his way to his apartment door, entering his code into the security panel beside it. As always, his door swings open with a hiss and a jolt, slamming into the wall behind it.

His cat, Princess, screeches from her position on his bed opposite the door and flies off the mattress to scurry to safety under the metal bed frame.

“You’d think you’d get used to it by now, Princess,” he mumbles, making sure the door closes behind him. The cat doesn’t answer.

His apartment is tiny. It takes maybe fifteen steps to cross from one end to the other, but it’s got just enough space for a little kitchenette with an electric stove that works 75% of the time and a mini fridge, a closet and bathroom, and his bed. Despite how small it is, though, or maybe because of it, it’s neatly kept, and the facilities are fairly modern and clean (except for the stove). His bed lines up against the far wall that has a privacy setting, a window setting, and a frosted glass setting. It doubles as a giant monitor, also, where he can swipe files from his tablet to view or directly view files and make calls from the cloud. Right now, though, his wall is on private, so Changkyun can’t see out, and no one can see in.

He throws his remaining pork buns into the mini fridge and carefully places his bag onto the counter of his kitchen. On autopilot, he unzips his bag and methodically begins to take out his knives and other weapons to be cleaned. He has a collection of them, all safely tucked into a strip of reinforced canvas that he can roll out across the counter. When on a contract, the knives and his trusted plasma Glock handgun live elsewhere on his body, in holsters over his thighs and sides that are easy to access, but he can’t really go around in public with all his weapons out on display -- his gleaming robotic arm tends to get enough attention as it is -- so he's gotten quite adept at stripping his weapons after a job and rolling them up into the canvas. 

Then he remembers he needs both hands to clean his knives and weapons properly. He looks down at his left arm and scowls. The wires at his shoulder are frayed and the air is starting to smell like static, that kind of fuzzy-nothing-smell that makes you nervous to touch doorknobs and walk across the carpet. He concludes he probably can’t fix his arm on his own. With a heavy sigh, he leaves his weapons on the counter and turns to attempt to fix Princess a bowl of food to eat instead. That, he can do one-handed.

“Hey Serenity,” he calls into the apartment.

“Yes, Changkyun?” The voice that answers him is pleasant and coded female. His watch vibrates in time with Serenity's words.

“Call Minhyuk,” he says.

“Okay,” Serenity chimes. “Calling Minhyuk.”

His line rings as the wall that is his window changes into a screen that glows with Minhyuk’s icon, an avatar of a puppy wagging its tail. Minhyuk picks up quickly, and the screen changes again, showing a view of his brother’s bedroom. It gives Changkyun a tiny blemish of pride to see that Minyuk's room is messier than Changkyun’s, clothes strewn over every piece of furniture.

“Oh, hey,” Minhyuk says. Changkyun tries to locate him on the screen as he stoops over to fill up Princess’ food bowl and puts it onto the floor by the counter. Minhyuk is sitting at his vanity, playing with makeup filters in his mirror to see what kind of look he wants to wear for the evening. Changkyun watches him swipe through multiple filters on the mirror, each one more glittery and colorful than the last.

“Hey,” Changkyun says. “Going out tonight?”

“It’s Friday,” Minhyuk sings in a husky voice, as though that explains everything. He’s wearing a tight leather bodysuit with the zipper in the front pulled up to his sternum, the pale skin of his chest and décolletage gleaming against the contrasting fabric. Changkyun has a feeling he’ll lower the zipper before he goes out. Fake, glittering cat ears adorn his head. “Aren’t you coming with us?”

“I don’t know.” Changkyun meanders over to his bed but doesn’t sit. “My arm’s a little fucked.”

This makes Minhyuk look up and into the screen. He squints at Changkyun and tuts, shaking his head. “You’ve got to be more careful when you go out on contracts,” Minhyuk chides. “That thing doesn’t have a warranty.”

“It did, actually,” Changkyun corrects and reminds him. “I just blew through it already.”

“All the more reason for you to be more careful.”

“I’ll make sure next time that all my damage is concentrated to my leg, then,” Changkyun says, alluding to his other, newer prosthetic from Zhang Technologies. The one for which he still owes a couple hundred thousand units. But it’s okay. He’s on a payment plan. “Are you gonna help me with my arm or not?”

Minhyuk sighs and rolls his eyes. “How should I know? You didn’t even  _ask me,_ ” he says, expectation clear in his voice.

Gritting his teeth, Changkyun tries to cross his arms and grunts in frustration when all he manages to do is kind of punch himself in the chest with his right fist since his left arm is dead. “Minhyuk-hyung, can you please call your butt buddy Hoseok and ask him to come over to fix my busted arm?”

“Pfft, my butt buddy.”

“What else would you call him?”

“My muffin muncher,” Minhyuk says. He rattles off a few more suggestions, playing with the cat ears on top of his head. “My dick daddy, my jizz juggler--”

“Please stop. You are truly disgusting.”

“I’ll call him,” Minhyuk says with a sly little grin on his face. It makes him seem more cat-like than the ears do. “If you come out with us tonight.”

Changkyun groans. “I don’t know,” he says again. “I’m exhausted. I just want to sleep.”

“Come out,” Minhyuk begs. “Come out come out come out come out--”

“Okay! Fine!”

Minhyuk cheers, clapping. “I’ll call him, now. And I’m bringing myself over, too. We’re gonna get you all dressed up!”

“I hate this,” Changkyun says.

“I love you!” Minhyuk chirps. He ends the call and leaves Changkyun with loud silence and a gray wall.

Princess pokes her paw from under the bed into the air a few times as if to test for rain or other things falling from the sky before deciding that it is safe to emerge, and comes out, her white tail raised high into the air. She brushes past Changkyun’s shins as though to thank him for the quiet and goes to her food bowl, digging into her dinner.

He follows her, squatting down beside her as she eats, observing the elegant curve of her spine as she hunches over her bowl. He can see the Fibonacci spiral in the shape of her body. She is an organic, living thing. Changkyun’s metal arm hangs limply at his side, dead without the use of the wires connecting it to him. He reaches to pet her head gently. “You never make me go out to clubs,” he whispers to her. “You just make me feed you and pet you and clean your poop. All in return for your distant form of affection.” She mews in warning and turns her tiny white head to glare at him. “Deep down, you love this hunk of scrap metal, though, right?”

She goes back to her food, nonplussed. Changkyun pushes his hand into the pocket of his pants and takes out the red, tasseled charm he picked up in Chinatown earlier at the Q train platform. With care and a bit of stealth, he manages to clip the charm onto Princess’ collar. The weight of it drags the collar down until the charm hangs from her neck in the center. “Now you’re like one of those lucky cats,” he coos, rubbing her behind her ear. She snaps her teeth at him in retaliation and to signal she is quite done with his attentions for the day.

He pulls back, grinning sheepishly. “All right, jeez.” His knees creak when he stands up slowly, his metal leg groaning. “Hey Serenity,” he calls again. His watch vibrates.

“Yes, Changkyun?”

“Play us some tunes.”

A lapsed silence. Changkyun imagines Serenity thinking, her presence humming inside the walls and out into the atmosphere filled with radio waves and static, and she comes back to him and says, “Okay, playing some tunes.”

-x-


	2. Chapter 2

“I think we’ll go with purple eyeliner tonight,” Minhyuk announces as he finishes a tiny single braid in Changkyun’s chestnut hair. He’s on Changkyun’s right and he’s woven a glittering ribbon into his hair, which Changkyun leaves alone because he can’t be bothered to fight it. Hoseok sits at Changkyun’s left on his bed, a pair of pliers clenched between his lips and a tiny screwdriver in his other hand. His narrow-eyed gaze is anchored on Changkyun’s shoulder, where his nimble fingers are busy stitching up Changkyun’s metal arm where he had to remove some of the outer paneling to get at the circuitry.

“I haven’t even showered yet,” Changkyun grumbles.

“Just wash the essentials,” Minhyuk advises. “Your hair looks great and it’s not like you can wash away the dark circles under your eyes.”

“Fantastic,” Changkyun deadpans.

“That’s what makeup is for!” Minhyuk finishes cheerfully, whipping out a concealer stick from seemingly nowhere. He looks amazing in his black catsuit, gold liner around his eyes and cheeks dusted in rainbow glitter. Hoseok, about the same height as Minhyuk but nearly twice his width, fills out a mesh muscle tank with his broad chest and sculpted arms.

“I’m not going anywhere until my arm is fixed.”

“Muh muhmuh muh,” Hoseok says with a mouthful of plier. Minhyuk graciously removes the tool from Hoseok’s mouth. “I’m almost done,” Hoseok says, shooting Minhyuk a little smile.

Minhyuk grins, going all gooey and blushing, and Changkyun gags out of reflex, which earns him a slap on his back.

“Hey!” Hoseok admonishes when Minhyuk’s harsh treatment makes him lose a handle on a delicate wire he was holding over Changkyun’s shoulder. “Don’t jostle the patient.”

Changkyun sticks his tongue out at Minhyuk. “Yeah, I’m the _patient_.”

“I wish they’d replaced your brain instead of your arm that time,” Minhyuk teases. “Kidding.”

“I wish they had, too,” Changkyun says with a one-shouldered shrug. “I’d be full android, then. Would have made a lot of things a lot easier.”

“I could have programmed you to be the perfect brother,” Minhyuk says wistfully.

“Instead, you’ve got me,” Changkyun says, not as wistfully.

Hoseok frowns as he replaces the top panel over where Changkyun’s bicep would be, sensing a slight discord between the two brothers. “There’s nothing wrong with you, Changkyun.” The panel secures and seals itself back into place with a hiss.

“You mean aside from the arm,” Changkyun says. “And the leg.”

“What’s wrong with your leg?” Hoseok asks, hunching over to peer more closely at the limb, as though he can see through the fabric of Changkyun’s pants.

“Nothing. Nothing’s wrong with the leg. I was just saying -- I just meant -- Never mind. I’m fine. I know there’s nothing wrong with me. And now you’ve fixed my arm!” He wiggles his robotic fingers for emphasis, and Hoseok beams at him. “So I’m good. And now you can go--”

“Hold up. The deal was that you’d come out with us.”

“Minhyuk hyung,” Changkyun whines.

“Changkyunnie,” Minhyuk mimics. “You have to come. I won’t have my little brother waste another perfectly good Friday night because you’re tired or sad or something.”

“I didn’t say anything about being sad--”

“You’re alive and you’re human and I just need you to _live_ a little, okay? Let me help you. I don’t like thinking about you keeping to yourself and being all depressed,” Minhyuk says. “And I really want to put this purple eyeliner on you because I think you’ll look amazing with it on.”

Minhyuk hits him with a puppy-dog-eyed stare that makes his heart thump loudly and painfully in his chest, and Changkyun relents. “But I’m showering first,” he says, yanking out the ribbon Minhyuk’s threaded into his hair a bit spitefully and dropping it into Hoseok’s palm before standing to go to his bathroom. “Please don’t do anything weird to my cat.”

-x-

They meet Minhyuk’s friend Hyungwon at the bar of the club, where he immediately supplies them with one shot glass each, the glasses filled with glowing blue liquid that leaves your teeth stained iridescent under the blacklights. Hyungwon’s tall, his limbs long and lanky and perfectly proportioned, and to make things even more unfair, he’s gorgeous. His lush, pouty lips and vaguely affronted gaze make him the first choice pick for many brands and agencies, and it’s not uncommon to walk two blocks in either direction in the city without coming across an ad with his face on it. Blowing kisses. Winking. Licking his lips. Just blinking attractively at you and staring. Standing next to him makes Changkyun feel particularly busted, clunky and ugly.  
  
“Drink!” is the only greeting Hyungwon shouts at them over the pulsating, throbbing music. The club is packed with bodies, and someone jostles Changkyun’s elbow as he goes to tip his drink into his mouth, resulting in half of it spilling down his chin and chest. The blue glow fades away as the liquid burns down his throat. He coughs and Minhyuk laughs, patting him on the back. Hoseok and Hyungwon are already deep in conversation to the side.  
  
“Aren’t you glad you came out with us?” Minhyuk asks.  
  
“Not yet.”  
  
His brother gives him a wry little grin and grabs a fistful of napkins from the bar, throwing them at Changkyun’s chest. “Just have fun, Changkyunnie,” Minhyuk says. “Let go for a bit.”  
  
Apparently, ‘letting go’ is taking another two shots at the bar before wobbling his way up the stairs to the VIP section behind Hyungwon, Hoseok, and Minhyuk and plopping himself onto one of the couches lined against the wall, away from the railing and the eyes of those on the lower levels. Up here, everything is plush, purple and dark. It smells of bergamot and citrus and something underneath that’s muskier, spicier. He lets his head roll back and inhales, the cloud of scents filling his mind like smoke.  
  
His blood starts to thrum in time with the music. He watches his friends dance, cheering each other on and relishing the attention they garner from the onlookers below. Minhyuk turns to him, mouths something at him because his voice won't carry across the chasm of space between them. _Come dance with us._  
  
Changkyun shakes his head. His arm feels too warm. His robotic one. It buzzes when it's around too many people, like it has a life of its own, like it wants to reach out and touch. But Changkyun knows he should keep his distance. His arm can punch through solid concrete. He doesn't like to think about what it can do to human flesh.  
  
Don't even get him started on his leg.  
  
A phantom pain shoots up his hip. Sometimes he remembers what it had felt like that day in the hospital, all these white coats around him, his leg such a mess that when he strained to look at it from his horizontal position on the rolling cot, his brain short-circuited and couldn't even process the image. He was going to lose it. All because of some stupid hot-shot contractor kid who thought the best way to bag a contract was to plant explosives all around the bunker where the target supposedly spent the majority of her time. Changkyun preferred to do things with a bit more stealth. He'd still been in the bunker when the explosives went off, and it was only by the grace of his metal arm that he managed not to be completely crushed under the rubble.  
  
In the end, the target got away, and Changkyun had ended up at the hospital, where the white coats all kept saying the same thing. _It's gotta go. It's gotta go. You'd be lucky to learn to walk again, even with a prosthetic._  
  
And then a representative from Zhang Tech came along, took a look at Changkyun's arm, and said: _We can have you walking again in less than a month._  
  
And now Changkyun will be in debt forever.  
  
A shadow blocks his view of Hyungwon, Hoseok, and Minhyuk. Changkyun blinks, and the shadow solidifies into the form of a curvy young woman, her skin blue-ish in the light. She leans over to give Changkyun an eyeful of her cleavage down the front of her tight top. "Doesn't look like you're having fun," she says-shouts. Her lips curl up slightly in a calculated, coquettish grin.  
  
"I'm having a blast," Changkyun says.  
  
"Want me to give you a dance?"  
  
Changkyun shakes his head. "No, thanks."  
  
The woman frowns. She's pretty, but in the way that makes the onlooker uneasy. Her neck is slightly too long, her nose slightly too pointed, her cheeks slightly too flushed and her eyes slightly too large. Changkyun looks past her unnaturally pretty face to her ears, where he sees a tiny charging port behind the curve of her left one. "You sure, honey?" she drawls, her voice dripping in honey. "Everyone tells me I give it really good."  
  
"I'm sure," Changkyun says. He crosses his arms for good measure and quirks his eyebrow. "Let me ask you something. Do you like going around asking people if they want you to give them a dance? Does it make you happy?"  
  
"It makes me happy," she says, flipping her hair back over her shoulder.  
  
"Do you know what it means to be happy?"  
  
She frowns. She says, "I don't understand the question."  
  
"Forget it. Go ask someone else if they want a lap dance. You're very pretty. I'm sure someone will say yes."

The woman rolls her eyes, an action that to Changkyun feels distinctly human. He wonders if she picked it up or if the action had been programmed into her from the start. She wanders off, hips swaying. Changkyun watches as she approaches another man in the VIP section, probably with the same question and same coquettish grin, only this time the man nods and she straddles his lap.

He looks away, pursing his lips. Changkyun isn’t a prude, but it strikes him as something particularly pathetic and skin-crawly, these PleasureBots strolling the dance floors masquerading as humans and leeching units from men and women too drunk or high or both to feel the slight difference in texture that synthetic skin has to the real thing. Not that he hasn’t succumbed to the temptation himself before; he’d just rather not witness the depravity when it’s someone else slobbering over what is essentially a heap of metal and wires.

The phantom pain in his hip returns, this time a searing line of heat deep in the hollows of his bones. He grimaces and takes a glowing blue shot off the tray of a shot girl that is flitting past, downing the shot quickly and letting the burn in his esophagus distract from the burn in his hip.

BLUE LAGOON SHOT

      -15 UNITS

He blinks away the transaction before it can show him the remaining balance in his account.

“Changkyunnie!” Minhyuk bounces over to him, grinning widely and flanked by Hyungwon and Hoseok. “I saw that. Come on. Dance with us.”

He groans as he stands, making a big show of it. “My hip hurts,” he complains.

“Come on, Tin Can,” Hyungwon teases, his teeth glinting under his curled upper lip. “Put some grease in your joints and let’s boogie.”

“I hate how you talk.”

“He’s just drunk,” Hoseok says. He takes Changkyun by the wrist, guiding him away from the couches and into a little pocket of the dance floor that magically opens up for them. Well, it’s not magic. Things come easy for beautiful people, and Changkyun knows objectively that Minhyuk and Hyungwon are beautiful. Hoseok, too, but in a different way.

“I love how he talks,” Minhyuk says, throwing an arm around Hyungwon’s shoulders and moving so that their hips are pressed together and they sway.

Changkyun says, “It’s weird dancing with my brother.”

Hoseok says, “So dance with me.”

He does, for a while. The music and the lights and the drinks swirl around and inside of him, and everything starts to blend. Changkyun loses himself in the movement, in the warmth of Hoseok’s skin so close. He takes another shot with his friends and the night blurs into something indecipherable from there.

Next thing he knows he’s in an alleyway, neon lights flickering above him, standing over a little puddle of his own puke.

“Gross,” he grumbles to himself. He blinks. The time flashes green in the corner of his eye. 3:24 AM. “Gross,” he says again. His whole body aches. He wonders where the others went, and then he notices shadows moving around the corner, and the sounds of a quiet struggle.

Thinking it could be Minhyuk, Changkyun jogs over to the shadows, worry creasing his brow. The world lurches around him every time he blinks, his brain sluggish and unable to keep up with the changes in scenery. The smooth concrete facade of the building he came out of. The way purple and pink and blue lights reflect off the puddles of what Changkyun hopes is water in the alley. A cracked screen to his left, playing an ad that’s bisected down the middle and looping, glitched. He turns the corner.

“Hey!”

His shout makes the two men he comes across freeze. The larger one has the smaller one pinned against the wall, his thick forearm pressed across the other man’s windpipe, his other hand grabbing a fistful of hair.

Changkyun’s chest tightens at the scene. He clenches his fists and his jaw. “What’s going on?”

“Fuck off,” the larger man says.

Changkyun holds up his hands, taking a careful step forward. “Hey, you okay?” he asks, voice loud enough to carry but soft enough to convey concern. The smaller man doesn’t respond. And then he looks at Changkyun, and Changkyun realizes he isn’t a man at all.

On the right side of his face, his skin has been torn away from the metal structure underneath, revealing the chrome plating and the hollow hole of his cheek. His eye rolls around in its socket and points its laser at Changkyun.

Changkyun takes an involuntary step back, hands still raised. “Holy shit.”

“Yeah,” the larger man grumbles. “Mind your own business.”

“What are you doing to it?”

“Fuck off,” he says again, before digging a tool that looks like a screwdriver into the side of the android’s head.

“Is it yours?”

The guy doesn’t answer. He pries off a piece of metal skull, exposing the wires underneath. The android pinned against the wall twitches underneath him. It opens its mouth.

“Help--”

The guy reaches into the bundle of wires he’s exposed and yanks them all out, and the android goes limp.

“Faulty PleasureBot,” the guy explains finally, looking at Changkyun with narrowed eyes, as though daring him to question his story.

“Right,” Changkyun says tersely. He takes another step back, not liking the way he’s being scanned and having the mental competency to at least recognize that he’s not in an ideal situation. “I’ll just go, then.”

“That sounds like a good idea,” the guy says. He’s holding the screwdriver in a way that looks like he could use it to slash Changkyun’s face open like how he did the Bot.

Changkyun takes the train back home, though in the morning he can’t recall how he got to the station, or even the walk from the station to his apartment.

-x-

Changkyun whips into consciousness and nearly falls out of bed when Serenity alerts him to an incoming call, and Princess swipes her claws across his foot in retaliation before leaping off the hard mattress and running off to hide in the relative peacefulness of his closet.

“Would you like to accept this call from: YOON, BORA?” Serenity asks, her voice that has been specifically programmed to instill a sense of calm in others offending him greatly.

“Serenity, what time is it?” Changkyun groans. His limbs feel heavy and his head feels like an anvil. He doesn’t think he could lift it if someone paid him 1000 units.

“It is currently 7:43 AM,” Serenity responds pleasantly. “Changkyun, would you like to accept this call from: YOON, BORA?”

Changkyun flops over onto his back and looks up at his ceiling. He runs his tongue over his teeth and breathes a sigh of relief since it seems he remembered to brush his teeth last night, somehow, when he got home. He hates the cotton-mouth feel and the film of grit over enamel that usually follows after a night of drinking. He blinks a couple of times to get his eyes adjusted to being open in the dim, grey light of morning. “Fine,” he says. “Accept call. No video.”

“Connecting.”

There’s a moment of silence, and then Bora’s cheerful voice: “I.M! Hey, got something for you. Something I think you’d like.”

Changkyun winces as Bora’s bright voice grates against his eardrums like nails on sheet metal. “Is it free units?” Changkyun asks.

“Ha ha ha,” Bora laughs. “No, silly. It’s a contract.”

“This couldn’t wait until I got to your office this morning?”

“It’s fresh off the griddle and perfect for you. I didn’t want you to lose it to some other bozo with a metal arm and a metal leg.”

“So kind.”

“Besides, you coming into the office after a night out has about a 65.4% success rate. I didn’t want to take any chances.”

“How’d you know?”

“ _Noona_ ,” comes Changkyun’s deep voice through the walls of his apartment. It takes half a second for Changkyun to realize what it is. A voice message he must have left on Bora’s feed last night. “ _I think I’m smashed. I just saw something weird. Also, I don’t want any contracts where I have to rip someone’s face off, okay? Please. None of those. Why can’t I just walk dogs for 500 units a day? Seems reasonable, right? Noona, let’s open up a dog-walking agency--_ ”

“It goes on,” Bora says. “You know, it’s kinda nice when you call me noona.”

“I don’t remember sending you that.”

“Doesn’t mean it didn't happen!” Bora says with a chuckle.

“Please tell me you got me a dog-walking contract.”

“Unfortunately, no,” Bora says. “But there’s no face-ripping in this one. Plus, the pay is good. 75,000 units.”

She pauses, no doubt to let that number sink in.

Holy shit. Changkyun stops breathing, considering it. 75,000 units. That’s enough to pay off a year’s worth of bills for his leg. Shoving that lump sum at Zhang Technologies might even get them to take it out of his principal, cutting the total number of payments he owes them in half. That’s years of his life back.

That’s affording rent somewhere where the water doesn’t shut off between the hours of 3 PM to 8 PM daily. That’s potentially going back to school.

“What is it?”

Bora says, “It’s a grab-and-go. I’ve got a product serial number and an address for where you can find the product. Seems to be a research facility of some sort. The contract comes with some info -- blueprints, staff schedules. They want the job done within the week.”

“They want me to steal something for them? That’s illegal.”

“Strange time for you to worry about the legality of our operation,” Bora comments.

“What’s the product?”

“Don’t know,” Bora says. “They won’t provide more information. Just said it’s very important and very secret. They asked for someone stealthy, who can get in and out quietly. I thought of you.”

“I’m flattered,” Changkyun quips.

Bora laughs. “Are you, really?”

Changkyun lets his silence be the answer. After a moment, he says, “75,000…”

“That’s right, sweetheart. That’s a big chunk of change. You in or out? I can send all the information over to you.”

He looks over to where Princess is slinking out of his closet, her white coat dull, the red charm dripping from her neck. He could take her for a nice grooming session, get her fattened up on the quality tuna. “The things I do for you,” he whispers to her. She responds by turning tail and going to the kitchen where her food bowl usually is and meowing pitifully and loudly.

“What the hell is that?” Bora asks.

“It’s just my cat, Princess,” Changkyun says. “I’m in. Send everything over.”

-x-


	3. Chapter 3

Changkyun pores over all the materials Bora sends him, throwing every file included in the contract from his tablet up onto his window screen, which quickly fills with images of blueprints, spreadsheets of each employee’s schedule, rosters, shipments and deliveries, and a couple of employee files with headshots attached.

He loses a couple of days fitting together all the pieces of the contract’s puzzle and hardly notices the passage of time, eating cup ramen when he remembers, sleeping in fits and starts because sometimes inspiration that connects one thread to another comes to him in the middle of his dreams. Minhyuk calls him once while he’s in the flow of things and threatens to send Hoseok over to him to sit on him so that he'll sleep for more than 2 hours at a time.

“Is it another one of those jobs?” Minhyuk asks, when all Changkyun does to respond to his threat is to grunt.

“Yeah.”

“Changkyunnie, I know you hate it when I say it, but be careful, okay? I really wish you’d just let me help you get set up, taken up bartending or something…”

“As you’ve said before,” Changkyun interrupts before Minhyuk can go into his rarely-activated nagging mode. He likes to tell Changkyun he’d make a good bartender, with his metal arm and everything. Very flashy, and he’d definitely get good tips since he's not so bad-looking. The thing is, Changkyun took a bartending class once and broke just about every single glass he tried to handle. The glass just slips right through his metal fingers. He's better with blueprints, and plans, and schedules. “Bartending can’t pay my bills.”

“But if you’re a  _ brilliant  _ bartender--”

“Hyung, I’ve got to focus. I promise, after this job, I can take a break for a while. Maybe even get trained up to do...something else.”

“What?” 

When he looks up from his tablet and up at his window screen, Minhyuk's eyes are huge and shining with something like hope. “What?" Changkyun question carefully.

“Do you promise?” Minhyuk asks. When Changkyun doesn't answer right away, Minhyuk pouts and bats his eyelashes. “To take a break and find something else to do to make money that doesn’t endanger your life needlessly?”

“Like modeling?” Changkyun quips, referring to Minhyuk’s own occupation.

Minhyuk huffs. “Changkyunnie, I’m serious.”

“Me, too,” Changkyun says quietly. “I’m serious, too. I’ll take a break. But I need this job to go well. So don’t call for a few days, okay? It’s distracting.”

Slowly, Minhyuk nods. “Fine. But don’t forget your promise. You have to keep it.” He presses his lips together. “I love you,” he says, but in a tone that sounds like he is a loving owner might scold his wayward puppy that just had an accident on his carpet.

“I love you, too,” Changkyun says, feeling something like bile rise up to the back of his throat. The promise sits there against his tonsils, cloying, suffocating. The truth is, he doesn’t know what he’d be doing if he weren’t doing this. But Minhyuk smiles and waves his farewell, and the promise is made. The call ends, and the screen goes blank. Changkyun throws the blueprints and schedules back up there.

Slowly, a plan formulates.

-x-

A quick internet search of the address of the research facility returns satellite images of a nondescript office-building that seems to have been empty for years, along with pictures of the boarded up windows and chains on the doors. Standing at the address, though, Changkyun can see that the research facility isn't inside a nondescript office-building at all, but what looks like a sleek modern structure that reeks of minimalism, the kind of building the eye just sort of skips over because there's nothing special about it. 

The facade is smooth and without any signs. Not even a street number. The windows are made of one-way glass so that the casual viewer can't look in. There's a single entrance in front, and people dressed in suits and dresses and the occasional lab coat enter and exit the building. Changkyun knows from the blueprints he's looked at that the building is just ten floors, dwarfed by the buildings that sandwich it on either side. He's so far up the island, on the narrow strip of land that remains of Inwood, that if he looks left he sees the park and what’s left of Jersey after the fallout and if he looks right he sees the Harlem River.    
  
He staked the place out yesterday, to see what he was getting into and to test the schedules that Bora had sent over to him. Knocked into one of the office workers going in and stuck a tiny camera to the lapel of the man's jacket when he helped him gather up his things and straighten his clothes after the bump. He saw what he needed to get in.

Changkyun waits around the corner now in an alley between the buildings, cap pulled low over his eyes, as he watches the door. He's got only what he considers essential gear with him so that when he manages to get through the front door, he won't trip security with anything bulky on his person. Just a knife stuck in a sheath around his thigh, hidden under the white fabric of a lab coat he bought at a thrift store after examining the ones the employees at the facility wore. He pretends to be an employee out on a smoke break, the unlit cigarette between his fingers.

A woman exits the building, pulling at her skirt. She walks briskly across the street.

A man in a suit exits the building shortly after, but Changkyun lets him go. He's not wearing the right clothes for the kind of access Changkyun wants to gain. More people leave and enter, mostly wearing suits.

Finally, a shorter man in a white lab coat exits from the front of the building. He pats the chest pocket of his lab coat, and then his pants pockets, and Changkyun watches him take out of a packet of cigarettes and pull one from the box. He walks toward the alley where Changkyun is, which Changkyun picked because he knows it's where employees like to take their cigarette breaks. He nods when the man enters the alley, and the man nods back.

"Hey," the newcomer greets amicably. "Got a light?"

"Yeah, sure." Changkyun digs into the pocket of his thrifted lab coat and produces a sleek lighter. He flips open the cap and a flame jumps into existence. The man leans forward with the cigarette between his fingers and lips and sucks in, lighting the tip, as Changkyun subtly flicks his other hand at the wrist to expose the tranquilizer dart strapped to his forearm. He cups his hand around the man's neck and sticks him with the needle, watching man's eyes widen before rolling back into his head before he even knows what's hitting him.

"Sorry, dude," Changkyun says quietly, hastily putting his shoulder under the man's arm and flicking his wrist again to hide the dart mechanism. "You'll wake up in a few hours, though. And you won't remember a thing." He drags him behind a dumpster in the alley and gently lowers him to the ground. Then he takes the man's lab coat and exchanges it for his own. The logo of the company is threaded into the collar. It looks like the letter Y. In the chest pocket are the man's ID security badge and glasses. He takes them both out. The badge has the man’s picture as well as his name and the words YANG CORP underneath. 

"Thank you, Mr. Wang." He covers Wang up with the fake lab coat and a couple of flattened cardboard boxes.

He waits another minute, checking to see if anyone has noticed the switch, but no one comes running at him, so he deems it safe to move on. He shoves his cap into his pants pocket, fixes his hair, and puts the glasses on, low on the bridge of his nose so he can actually look over the lens. Wang has a nose with a high bridge like Changkyun does, and a similar complexion. Changkyun hopes that's enough for him to pass under the radar.

Getting through the front door is surprisingly easy. He scans the security badge and the door pops open for him. There's a set of turnstiles in the lobby, as well as a pair of receptionists and security guards. He scans his badge at the turnstile, and the gate opens for him there as well.

"Welcome back, Wang," one of the receptionists says, not bothering to look at him.

"Hm," Changkyun says back, hoping that's enough of an acknowledgment. It is. The receptionist doesn't say anything more, and Changkyun heads to the elevators.

He has to use his badge on the different sets of elevators. He knows from the blueprints that were sent over to him that the product is on the 8th floor, and in one of the rooms on the east side. Most of the employees working in the building have security clearances to floors 1 through 7, and there's one set of elevators serving these floors. Only lab coats have access to floors 8 and above, and there's another set of elevators for these floors specifically. Changkyun scans Wang's ID and presses 8 on the keypad. The door to one of the elevators near the end of the row opens.

He steps in, letting out a breath when the elevator doors close without anyone else getting in with him. He's feeling lucky today.

His belly flips over with the speed at which the elevator delivers him to the 8th floor. When the doors open again, Changkyun sees white.

The halls are white, the doors are white, the ceiling is white. He steps out and feels blinded by the starkness of the whole thing. There are no windows, not even ones to look out or into the rooms that line the hallway. He walks past everything slowly, reading. The tiny labels to the side of the doors above yet another security keypad offer little information. 

PROJECT SH-0618, reads one.

PROJECT XK-0802, reads another.

The barcode the contractor sent him is KH-1122-0004. He finds the sign next to the fifth door down the hallway: "PROJECT KH-1122". Changkyun takes out Wang's badge and scans it against the reader on the keypad. A light over the keypad turns green, then yellow. The locks clicks, remaining secure. Changkyun looks at the keypad forlornly, the numbers 1 through 9 laid out in a standard 3x3 pattern. "Let's hope you're not too complicated," he says to himself.

The elevator dings. Changkyun stills, looking over his shoulder at the brunette woman who walks out of it. She strides to the door one down and across from Changkyun, her white lab coat billowing out behind her. She scans her badge and quickly enters a code into the keypad, and her door unlocks. As she's pushing open the door into the room hidden behind it, she frowns at Changkyun. "You zoning out again?" she asks.

"Uh," Changkyun says. "Yeah. Forgot the code for a second."

She shakes her head. "Lay off the booze and Bots, Wang," she says, chuckling as she disappears behind the door. “It’s the same as it always is -- reverse project and the version you’re on.” The door shuts, and the hall is quiet again. 

Again, Changkyun counts his ironically lucky stars that even in this day and age, it seems most people still can't tell one Asian person from another.

Also, he counted a 5-digit code for the door.

Working quickly, Changkyun blinks through the settings on his contact lens until he gets to the heat signature filter. The keypad lights up in reds and oranges and purples and blues, with reds and oranges concentrated on just 3 numbers. That means one or two numbers are repeated in the code. It'll take him forever to get through all the different combinations, so he thinks on what the woman told him as a clue. Could it really be so easy? 

He scans Wang's ID again and inputs 22114. The light turns green above the keypad and stays green. He tries the handle. It gives, and he opens the door.

-x-

When Changkyun was thirteen and Minhyuk was sixteen, the little family of four went on vacation to Seoul to celebrate their parents' three-year wedding anniversary. Changkyun’s mom had met Minhyuk’s dad in New York on a business trip. They married and moved to New York City within a year, bringing their children with them. The new family cozied up in a two-bedroom apartment in the nice part of Brooklyn so that Minhyuk could go to one of the special tech high schools that he tested into for free. But Changkyun knew that, actually, Minhyuk would have preferred to skip school all the time to graffiti the streets and walls of their community instead.

Minhyuk never got to go to that school, anyway, because a truck careened into the bus they were taking home from JFK International Airport in Queens after they landed from their flight back from Seoul. They’d made it all the way across the ocean and the continent, and it was here in their own backyard that Minhyuk and Changkyun lost their parents -- and almost each other, too.

Changkyun remembers waking up in the hospital without his arm. He remembers the white noise, the static in his brain. He remembers Minhyuk shouting down doctors and nurses and social workers who were three, four, five times his age. “I’m sixteen! We’re brothers! I can be his guardian in a year!”

He remembers the smell. Chlorine, bleach, and blood. Sickness lingering in the air despite the disinfectant mist filtering through the ventilation system. It’s what he smells now, and it nearly makes him retch.

The door opens to reveal a small, dark room. He closes the door behind him, and at first, Changkyun thinks the room is completely without light, but then he realizes his eyes just need to adjust to the sudden dimness, a sharp contrast from the glaring white light of the hallway. A strip of light lines the walls at the ceiling level, turned low. He sees six hospital beds, three on each side of the room, five of them filled. Machines and monitors stand next to each bed, wires snaking from them to connect to the figures tucked under the covers.

Changkyun walks to the one closest to him, curious and cautious, peering at the small body there under the blanket. It’s a man. Changkyun sees stringy brown hair and pale skin, a sharp nose. Gaunt cheeks. He looks closer. His skin isn’t just pale, but has a slight bluish tint to it. His eyes move behind his eyelids as shallow breaths make his ribcage rattle. Changkyun grimaces, creeped out by how much this poor guy resembles a skeleton.

“Dr. Wang?” someone from one of the other beds asks. Changkyun gasps and takes an involuntary step back, glancing around quickly for the source of the voice.

One of the patients -- is it right to call them patients? -- is sitting up. Changkyun stares at him. Then looks back down at the man in the bed closest to him. Then back at the other one. Their features are striking: same high cheekbones, same sharp nose.

The same face.

The patient says, “He’s not doing very well, is he?”

Changkyun, stunned into silence, shakes his head.

“Are you here to do rounds? Where's Dr. Wang?” The patient purses his lips together. His eyes seem to glow in the dark. His cheeks are slightly fuller than the other patient’s, and rosier, too. His chestnut brown hair bounces lightly before framing his face when he brushes his fingers back through it. “He was just here so you're not here for rounds.” His eyes light up again, this time accompanied with a smile. “Is it time to take a walk?”

“No,” Changkyun says, swallowing thickly and hoping the patient can't see far enough to notice he's got Wang's ID pinned to his lab coat. He goes back to the first patient and tries to look like he’s checking his charts or something, and he doesn’t miss how the other patient’s shoulders sag. He clears his throat, glancing around the small room again for any packages that could be his target. The sooner he finds the damned thing, the sooner he can get out of this creepy facility. His mind starts to wander with questions. Are the two look-alikes twins? Perhaps they are here as medical subjects, trying out some new drug to battle a disease one out of the pair has. What about the three other figures in the other beds? Do they all look like that, too? What has Changkyun stumbled into?

He checks one of the machines for a serial number, trying to focus on the task at hand. Great hospital equipment might be hard to come by these days in this economy but Changkyun isn’t sure he’d pay someone 75,000 units for a beeping heart monitor. “Hey, did any deliveries come through here recently?”

“Deliveries?” the patient repeats. He cocks his head. He smoothes the thin blanket he’s under over his lap. “Where is Dr. Wang?”

In a flash, the patient is on his feet, wires ripping out of his skin. He’s wearing thin cotton pants and a simple white t-shirt and his bare feet slap against the ground as he runs to the door, hand outstretched. Changkyun notices too late that there’s a big red panic button to the side of the door. He launches himself at the patient’s waist, nearly succeeding in bringing him down at the last moment, but the patient is surprisingly strong, and wrenches himself to make the last step and slap his hand against the button.

An alarm shrieks through the room. None of the figures on the beds stir as Changkyun tries to wrestle the patient to the wall.

“Wang's fine! Calm down!” Changkyun shouts into the man’s ear. He pushes his metal arm against the man’s back to pin his chest against the wall, and the patient struggles. He sees a tattoo at the base of the patient’s neck, the ink spanning no more than the length of Changkyun’s thumb.  _ KH-1122-0004 _ . His eyes widen.

“I can’t breathe!” the patient wheezes.

Changkyun lets up instantly, and the patient whirls around with his hand like a blade, slicing across Changkyun’s neck. He chokes, stumbling back, as KH-1122-0004 trips him to the ground with a swift kick to his ankles and puts a knee on his chest as Changkyun tries not to cough up a lung on his back, winded.

KH-1122-0004 makes a fist and raises it, eyes narrowed and teeth bared. "Where is Dr. Wang!" he growls.

Changkyun puts his hands up. “Wait! Wait, wait, wait. I’m not here to hurt you. Or anyone! I’m here to -- to get you out.”

The patient lowers his fist, just slightly. “Out?” he repeats. Around them, the alarm still blares, the lights flashing on and off.

“Yes,” Changkyun says. “Out. I’m here to get you out.”

“Like...outside?” He lowers his fist completely. Changkyun watches in the strobing lights how his face changes from feral to confused to hopeful. He’s young, Changkyun realizes. Probably around Changkyun’s age. He takes his knee off Changkyun’s chest and pulls him up to standing with the same hand he was about to use to pound his face in.

“Yeah. You and -- maybe your brothers, too.”

“My brothers?”

Changkyun gestures to the others in the beds. KH-1122-0004 shakes his head.

“We’re not brothers. They won’t make it, anyway. We’ll have to leave them.”

“Just like that?”

“I want to go outside,” he says. “Security will arrive in 5 more seconds. What is your plan?”

Changkyun has a plan. He sheds the lab coat as he runs through the plan quickly in his head, leaving the clothing in a heap on the ground. The plan was Plan R originally and involved him making an escape with a package under his arm and not a whole human, but now it will have to be The Plan. He recalls the blueprints he’s memorized, weighs the value of his own life against the lives of the strangers in these hospital beds, sends a silent prayer up to a god he doesn’t really believe in, and asks, “You’re not claustrophobic, are you?”

-x-

KH-1122-0004 is not claustrophobic, but Changkyun underestimated how awful the sewage pipes under the building leading out to the river would smell. He chokes as he stomps through the sludge underfoot. At least he’s wearing boots. KH-1122-0004 is barefoot and probably at risk for half a million unsavory diseases by now.

“I do not like this,” KH-1122-0004 says behind him. “So far, the inside is much better than the outside.”

“We’re not outside yet,” Changkyun whispers, mindful of how their voices carry in the tunnels. He can see the circle of light at the end where the tunnel opens, can hear the sound of running water. Harlem River.

“This. Is. Disgusting.”

“It gets better,” Changkyun assures him. “When we get outside, there’s water. And the sky. And fresh air. But we’ll have to be quick. We’ll have to run.” He looks back at the patient, who pauses in his steps as Changkyun appraises him. There’s a streak of grime over his cheek, and his pants are wet and clinging to him up to this knees. “Maybe we’ll stop to get you some clothes and shoes, first.”

“Shopping,” KH-1122-0004 says, offering Changkyun a small smile. It softens the features of his face, and also catches Changkyun off-guard.

“Um, yes. Something like that.”

“I’ve seen the water and the sky. But I’ve never been shopping before,” he says almost giddily.

“Well, there’s a first time for everything.”

They splash forward three more steps before Changkyun senses something is amiss. When he steps forward again, a pair of security guards emerges out of one of the connecting tunnels with their stun guns out. He has two lasers trained on his chest before he can take a breath.

“Don’t move,” one of the guards says. His voice bounces off the curved walls, throwing the order back at them.

Changkyun freezes, raising his hands.

The other guard squints at the flash of metal that is his hand and arm. “Drop your weapon!” he shouts, shaking the stun gun at him.

“Woah, woah,” Changkyun starts. “It’s just my arm. I can’t drop it. It’s my arm.”

He spots movement out of the corner of his eye, and spins around only to see KH-1122-0004 run past him so fast he seems to be walking on the water and the walls. Electricity crackles behind his feet as the guards fire their guns, but the crackling plasma bullets are too slow to catch him. He makes quick work of them both, knocking the weapons from their hands before whipping his heel into one guard’s temple and his fist into the other guard’s. They both go down into the water. Wordlessly, he drags one to the side to slump against the tunnel wall so he doesn’t drown, and Changkyun finally unsticks his feet so he can do the same for the other.

“Okay, uh,” Changkyun says, glaring at the patient, “what the fuck?”

“What is a fuck?” KH-1122-0004 asks, wiping his hands dry on the guard’s shirt.

Changkyun’s eyes just about drop out of his head. “It’s -- it’s an expression,” he explains. “Like, holy shit? What the hell? Holy smoke?”

The other snaps his fingers. “Where there is smoke, there’s fire,” he responds. “That is an expression, too.”

“Who are you?” Changkyun asks, finally.

“Dr. Wang calls me KH-one-one-two-two-zero--"

“That’s not a name,” Changkyun says. “That’s a serial number. A barcode. What’s your name?”

“What’s yours?” he shoots back quickly.

“Changkyun. My name is Changkyun.”

The other presses his lips together in a thin line as a shadow passes behind his eyes. He turns to the light at the end of the tunnel. “Sometimes,” he says, walking forward, “when we had visitors, they called me Kihyun.”

-x-


	4. Chapter 4

The tunnel drops away suddenly with only a narrow concrete ledge separating them from a fifteen foot fall into the rushing waters of the river. Changkyun steps out onto the ledge, careful with his footing, and cranes his neck to look up at the street above the tunnel. No guards above them looking over the railing at the edge. About twenty paces to his left there’s a ladder built into the adjacent wall that will take him and Kihyun up to the sidewalk, up to the small patch of green aptly named Riverside Park.

“Stick close,” Changkyun says behind him to Kihyun, who nods once, the movement sharp. “Don’t run off, got it?”

“Where would I run to?” Kihyun asks, though from his tone it is clear he isn’t expecting an answer. Changkyun turns back to his front, focusing on quite literally putting one foot in front of the other to get to the ladder. The narrow strip of concrete is just about the width of his foot, and with the water rushing below him, he has to will himself not to fall victim to vertigo.

Finally, he reaches the ladder and climbs, pausing and peering below him occasionally to make sure that Kihyun is following. It’s a short climb, and he lingers below street level for a moment to wait for the coast to be clear before popping over the top. Kihyun emerges after him.

The other man's feet are filthy, as are his pants. This doesn’t seem to bother Kihyun, who stands expectantly by Changkyun’s side with his feet shoulder width apart and his hands behind his back. He quirks an eyebrow when Changkyun regards him.

Changkyun shakes his head. “C’mon. There’s a public restroom in the park. Let’s clean up a little and then get moving.”

“What is the objective?” Kihyun asks.

“To not get caught,” Changkyun says brusquely, starting in the direction of the restrooms. “No offense, but I wasn’t expecting you to be a -- a person.”

“What were you expecting?”

“A package.”

“Hm,” Kihyun says. “You were meant to find something in the facility. I was not what you were expecting, and yet you decided to bring me out, anyway. You adapted. Why have you done this?”

Changkyun glares at Kihyun, though a part of him is fascinated by his external thought process. They pass by a patch of green where people have laid out blankets for picnics, where a group of teenagers is playing a game of electric frisbee. By one of these blankets is a pair of sandals. Changkyun stoops down and picks them up without pausing to take a breath. “It’s my job.”

“Your job is to break into places and to steal things,” Kihyun surmises. “You have stolen me like you stole those shoes.”

“The shoes are for you,” Changkyun says pointedly. They near a squat building with two entrances, though neither are labeled for a gender identity. Changkyun enters through the left, and Kihyun does the same. There are three stalls and a shower at the end with a nozzle overhead and a separate nozzle at foot-level. Changkyun checks the stalls. All empty. “Clean up as best you can and then wear these,” Changkyun instructs. He throws the sandals to the floor and they slap against the ground. “There are a lot of weird things in the city but you can bet that if you’re walking around barefoot, people are going to notice.”

“It would be bad for people to notice me,” Kihyun says, obligingly going into the shower stall at the end. He turns on the nozzle at foot-level and rinses the grime from his feet. Changkyun looks down at his own boots, which are now soaked, ruined, and stinky. He’ll just have to throw them out later.

“It would be bad,” Changkyun says. He gestures at Kihyun to move a little faster. “They’d take you back, I definitely won’t get paid, and then they’d probably put me in jail. Or something.”

“You don’t want to go to jail,” Kihyun says, turning off the spray of water. He steps into the sandals and slowly, methodically, checks the straps are in place. They’re a little big, but they’ll do for now.

“No one wants to go to jail.”

“I don’t want to go back,” Kihyun says suddenly, looking at Changkyun with such intensity that Changkyun can’t even blink. “I’m not sure, but I think that place...it’s like jail.” There’s a note of panic behind his eyes, subtle but real, like a bruise he is trying to keep hidden behind long sleeves over his knuckles. Then he blinks and the bruise is gone, like it was never there to begin with.

“You won’t have to go back,” Changkyun says, and oh god, what is he saying? Now that they’re out of the building, away from the river, what he’s seen and done over the last hour is starting to catch up with him. The hospital smell of sickness. The not-patients in the hospital beds and the wires and the machines. The skeleton-man. Kihyun’s questions. Kihyun’s acute skill in hand-to-hand and unexpected strength in his small stature. Changkyun is starting to feel maybe this job is worth a lot more than 75,000 units.

A tremor begins in his hands, so he clenches his fist to keep his fingers from shaking. He’s just abducted someone. Presumably, if his gut is anything to go by, he’s taken Kihyun from something bad.

But it is still abduction. This is a line Changkyun has never crossed before, and has never thought he would.

But then there’s the bruise behind Kihyun’s eyes, and the innocent, hopeful smile he flashed when Changkyun told him he would get him out. “You listen to me, and you won’t have to go back there,” he promises before he can bite his own tongue.

-x-

Miraculously, they are not followed on the way to Changkyun’s apartment. Still, he takes a long, round-about way back to his place, just in case.

Kihyun follows like a puppy on a leash, never too far behind, though he stops to read almost every sign, gets distracted by interesting smells and wanders, and sometimes just pauses to look up at the sky and breathe. And, like a puppy, Changkyun has to backtrack a couple of steps and tug on Kihyun's sleeve or hand to get his attention again so they can keep moving.

He almost feels bad when they reach his building and Kihyun has to go back indoors. He's never noticed before how bare the walls are, how narrow the hallways, how small the elevator car. Changkyun nearly suffocates from the thick unease clouding up the box in the elevator ride up to his floor.

“You live here?” Kihyun asks as soon as the door hisses open and slams against the wall in Changkyun’s apartment. His nose crinkles in clear distaste as his eyes roam around the small space, lingering on the pile of clothes outside of Changkyun's bathroom door.

Changkyun bristles like a porcupine with all his spines standing up straight on his back. Yeah, it's a little messy, but it's _his_ mess, and besides, Minhyuk is _way_ messier. “Yeah. It’s home.”

“It is,” Kihyun says, pausing to find the right word. “Functional.”

“Pfft. Don’t get too cozy. We’re just laying low for tonight before I bring you to Bora.”

“Who is Bora?”

Changkyun starts to unlace his boots, cursing his quick mouth. "She's my handler," Changkyun doesn't quite lie. It's true; she is the one who cultivates contracts and, as they grew to know each other over the years, she has even begun handpicking the ones she thinks will be particularly worthwhile to him. "She's great. Pretty, too."

"I do not care about that," Kihyun says with a dismissive wave of his hand. "Why are you bringing me to your handler?"

Changkyun wrangles the boots off his wet, socked feet and walks into his matchbox-sized kitchen. He tosses his boots down the trash chute built into the wall by the sink, listening to them clanging against the metal sides of the chute on the way down. On a whim, he rips off his socks and throws them down the chute as well. “Give me those sandals.”

Kihyun steps out of them, picks them up, and hands them to Changkyun, who tosses them down the chute, too. Every few hours, the trash at the bottom of the chute is collected and incinerated, the resulting ashes compressed into hard bricks and carted off to be used for fuel or recycled in some other way. Kihyun asks, “What does Bora want with me?”

75,000 units, Changkyun reminds himself. A better apartment. Paying off his debt. Feeding Princess. Going back to school. All things that he deserves, as Minhyuk would say. He repeats everything in his head like a mantra and does not look at Kihyun. Bora isn’t evil. She would never take a contract that would harm someone innocent, and she'd definitely never give Changkyun a contract like that.

Right?

That’s what Changkyun has to believe. “It’s not part of my job to know. My job is to bring you to her,” Changkyun explains. "That's all."

"You don't ask questions."

Changkyun shakes his head, remembering how Kihyun had stood when they climbed onto the street level of the park from the tunnel. Feet shoulder-width. Hands behind his back. He's military, Changkyun realizes. A soldier. He has to be.

"Because you are not allowed, or because you don't think you'd like the answer?"

"Listen," Changkyun says, hoping he's right about the military thing and trying to summon up his best impression of a soldier with too much on his plate so that Kihyun will back off without suspecting too much. "I had my orders. I got you out. Now I bring you to Bora. She didn't tell me anything else because there's nothing more we need to know. And we can't risk leaving now because there's bound to be heat on you. And on me. We lay low, and we head out tomorrow."

Kihyun's jaw works, and a wrinkle forms in his brow. The tension sits there visible just underneath his skin, and Changkyun swallows, shifting slightly on his feet and falling his hands into fists subtly just in case. But Kihyun just nods, and Changkyun relaxes his hands.

"What now, then?" Kihyun questions.

“Now?” Changkyun thinks. The adrenaline from earlier that carried him through escaping the building and making it home has left him and depleted him, and now he is exhausted. There’s a twinge in his shoulder where his metal arm connects. He lets himself rest his hip against the counter of his kitchen. “Now we shower, and rest, and eat. Maybe not in that order. Well, except you should definitely shower first. You stink.”

-x-

The little white lie eats away at Changkyun as Kihyun showers in his closet of a bathroom and Changkyun rummages in his cabinets in the kitchen to find things he can throw together for a meal for them both. Should he have told Kihyun the truth? Does it matter? It's just his job. He has to make money somehow, and there isn't much else he can do outside of this. If he botches this up, who's to say Bora will let him work another one of her contracts again?

So he’s just going to bring Kihyun to Bora tomorrow, get paid, and wash his hands of the whole ordeal quickly after, anyway. The truth is inconsequential. Changkyun got Kihyun out of that horrible place where the white coats were probably running illegal -- or at least unethical -- experiments on humans and he can feel good about that.

Maybe.

He scratches at his head in frustration and kicks his foot out at the bottom of his refrigerator, sucking in a breath through his teeth when a shock of pain shoots up his toe up to his knee. Shit. He hobbles over to the table beside his bed and flings open the shallow drawer under the flat surface, taking out his tablet, fingers already flying across the screen. He almost sits on his bed before he remembers he’s filthy, and with a grunt goes back to his kitchen where he has a little stool he keeps under the counter, taking it out to sit down. 

The tablet buzzes in his hand as a notification appears in the corner of his eye. He blinks it away, preferring to use his tablet.

TO XXXX:  
_What the hell noona?_

FROM XXXX:  
_What?_

TO XXXX:  
_Since when are you involved in human trafficking?_

FROM XXXX:  
_You got the package?_

The messages sent to Bora's secure feed self-scramble within moments of receipt, then disappear into the cloud somehow. Bora had explained it to him once, but the technical aspects had gone in one ear and out the other.

Changkyun used to like science, once. He did well in school when they learned about circuit boards and cloud-based technologies, putting together models of atoms and molecules and figuring out how things worked. Then he’d lost his arm and his parents. He’d almost lost Minhyuk, too, and from then on he figured it was probably better not caring about things, because things could be lost. And then where would you be?

So he stopped caring about a lot of things.

But this...

TO XXXX:  
_This is wrong._

FROM XXXX:  
_Depends from where you’re looking._

Changkyun grimaces and takes special care not to use his robotic hand to type lest he accidentally presses too hard and breaks his screen.

TO XXXX:  
_From all angles. He’s not a package. He’s a man. And you didn’t prepare me._

FROM XXXX:  
_You didn’t ask questions. You could have dropped him when you found out, but I’m guessing you didn’t._

TO XXXX:  
_I didn’t think you’d get your hands dirty like this noona._

FROM XXXX:  
_Do you want the 75k or not?_

Changkyun sighs, leaning back against the counter. The hard edge digs into his back.

TO XXXX:  
_What’s going to happen to him after I give him to you?_

FROM XXXX:  
_Not my business. Nor yours._

Frustrated, he exits out of the screen and turns the tablet face-down on the counter, dragging his hands over his face.

Changkyun remembers once when he found a little bird on the sidewalk a block away from his family's apartment. There was something wrong with its wings. Changkyun, a curious kid, brought it home cupped in his small hands and fed it water and salted sunflower seeds that he found in the cupboard. Minhyuk got home after he did because he was older and had a slightly longer school day, and when he saw the bird, he told Changkyun to hide it in a shoebox under his bed. "Your mom will flip," Minhyuk had said. "You can't let her see that."

Changkyun didn't understand how a little bird could be such a big deal, but he did as Minhyuk said, and he kept giving the bird water and salted sunflower seeds every day after school until one day he got home and it wasn't there anymore.

"It died, Kyunnie," his mom told him. "You can't keep a living thing in a box under your bed. I'm sorry, baby."

Changkyun remembers crying that night, for the bird, and for realizing the hidden cruelty in his own actions. He'd only been trying to help, and things had gone horribly wrong.

They kept Kihyun in a box, Changkyun thinks. A real, live human being stuck in a box on the 8th floor of that facility. And Changkyun got him out. Maybe he can't just drop him off at Bora's feet like a parcel and walk away from this. What if they put him in another box?

The bathroom door opens and steam billows out from the inside. Kihyun comes out with a towel wrapped around his waist, his skin gleaming and wet, his cheeks flushed from the heat. Changkyun's mouth goes dry. Kihyun's lean and wiry, his waist narrow and tapered. And he's covered in scars. Some thin and silver, others ragged and angry pink, newly healed. Changkyun traces them all with his eyes, counting them, wondering where they came from.

After a moment during which Changkyun realizes how hard he's been staring at Kihyun's body and blushes, Kihyun clears his throat and says, "I need clothes."

Changkyun stumbles, standing too quickly and knocking his hip against the stove. "Uh, yeah. Of course. Hold on." He jerks his robotic leg forward and walks to his closet, rifling through the stack of shirts in a cubby and pulling one out at random. He tosses it to Kihyun, who catches it one-handed. Next, he finds a pair of sweats for Kihyun to wear. "Oh, and--" He throws him a pair of boxers, too.

"Thank you," Kihyun says, and drops the towel from his waist right in the middle of Changkyun's studio, baring everything.

"Jeez!" Changkyun turns back to face the innards of his closet. "You, uh, aren't shy, huh?"

"What's there to be shy about?" Kihyun asks with no hint of smugness in his voice. "I'm done," he says after a moment. "You don't have to be so prude."

Changkyun bristles, turning around just in time to see his shirt cover the pale skin of Kihyun's torso. "I'm not a prude. I'm just not accustomed to men getting naked in the middle of my apartment without warning."

Kihyun, the bastard, smirks.

Changkyun feels his face go red and hot. "That's not what I meant."

"I have no idea what you could mean," Kihyun offers blithely. He ambles slowly to the bed and hesitantly takes a seat on the very edge of the mattress. Princess decides at that moment to make herself known and slinks out from under the bed to rub her body against Kihyun's calves. "What the--!"

Kihyun's knees come up to his chest as he falls back on the bed so quickly that Changkyun actually hears his teeth clacking together with the force of it, and Changkyun bellows out a laugh. His cat leaps up onto the mattress and curls her body on top of Changkyun's pillow, giving Kihyun her best glare.

"That's Princess," Changkyun says when he’s calmed down. "She's my cat."

Kihyun stares at her.

"She's harmless," Changkyun continues. "Mostly."

He watches Kihyun's throat bob in the profile of his neck. Watches how Kihyun extends an arm out to the feline and slowly, slowly strokes her little forehead. She glares at him the whole time, but eventually, she closes her eyes and allows Kihyun to continue petting her.

"She's so soft," Kihyun whispers, his voice full of wonder. His body shifts closer to her on the bed.

Changkyun's heart is suddenly beating in his throat. His arm buzzes. His leg feels hot. His head is spinning like when he breathes in too much smoke in the club, temples pulsing. "I'm going to shower," he announces. "There's rice in the cooker. It'll beep when it's done. There's kimchi and stuff in the fridge. Help yourself."

He rushes into the bathroom and closes the door behind him, resting his forehead against the solid barrier and taking deep, slow breaths. 75,000 units, he reminds himself. A new life. A life he deserves.

-x-

The few hours left of daylight pass quickly after they eat. Changkyun monitors the news streams for any indication that they’re being chased or targeted and Kihyun makes himself comfortable on Changkyun’s bed, playing with Princess’ paws as much as she allows. Changkyun doesn’t have the heart -- or the will, or the energy -- to tell him to move or to stop making those soft faces at his cat. Kihyun doesn’t ask any more questions about Bora.

Hours later, when Changkyun can recite the headlines in the news verbatim with how many times he’s scrolled past the same ones, Kihyun says, “We didn’t go shopping, after all.”

“Hm?” Changkyun, sitting with one ankle thrown over his knee on a stool at his kitchen counter, looks up from his tablet. There’s nothing in his feed about a break-in at a facility in Inwood. No APB’s out on a missing person fitting Kihyun’s description in that area. Just a few notices here and there -- Changkyun finds some amusement in the fact that someone has reported their sandals stolen. Such a little thing, but he supposes it would be very annoying to discover his footwear gone out of the blue.

“We didn’t go shopping, after all,” Kihyun repeats. He’s sitting cross-legged on the bed and has Princess in his lap, fingers scratching under her chin. She’s about the size of Kihyun’s forearm, and her head fits nicely into the crook of Kihyun’s elbow. Changkyun pouts at the image; Princess almost never cozies up to him like that.

“We didn’t,” Changkyun says. “Did you really want to?”

Kihyun’s fingers move to scratch Princess’ chest, and she flops over in his lap to receive belly scratches. He asks, “What’s it like?”

“What’s what like? Shopping?”

“Being out there,” Kihyun whispers. His back is to Changkyun’s window-wall. It’s dark for now. No one can see in, and they can’t see out. Changkyun didn’t want to risk being exposed. Drones fly by every hour or so with cameras, feeding information back to the local precinct and monitoring the citizens of New York, and he can’t take the chance that someone will see them, report them.

“You saw it,” Changkyun says, referring to their mad dash from the facility, through the park, to the streets. He recalls Kihyun’s wide-eyed stare at the buildings that reached the sky, the way he wanted to stop to touch everything. Changkyun shrugs. “It’s crowded, mostly. Everyone minds their own business.”

Kihyun says quietly, “I was raised in the facility. It’s all I’ve known. They said I wasn’t ready yet for the outside, but now I don’t know.”

Changkyun puts his tablet on the counter, frowning as the image of the facility returns to him. He still doesn’t know what the facility is for, nor why Kihyun was there, but the more he learns about it the more he’s convinced it’s a place built on a rocky foundation of questionable ethics and morals. “What do you mean they said you weren’t ready?”

Kihyun looks down at Princess. She’s fallen asleep in his lap from his constant petting, purring slightly as he runs his hand over the soft fur of her belly. A wrinkle forms in his brow, and when he locks eyes with Changkyun again, his gaze is hard, his eyes a wall. “What time will we go to Bora tomorrow?”

“Early,” Changkyun answers, so startled at the change in subject that he flinches back. He chooses not to ask his question again, recognizing a trigger when he sees one.

“Then you should sleep,” Kihyun suggests. “It is late.”

Changkyun blinks, and the time appears in the corner of his eye in glowing green numbers, followed by a few updates and reminders that disappear when he blinks again. He looks at Kihyun on his bed squashed into the corner of his apartment, and then he looks at his floor. The hard surface looms before him as though taunting him, and even though his belly twists at the idea of sharing his barely-queen-sized mattress with a stranger whose hands could probably be classified as weapons, he knows he won’t make Kihyun move to sleep on it.

“We can, uh, share the bed,” he decides. “I don’t have an extra air mattress or anything. So don’t hog the blankets, or I’ll kick you off.”

“Don’t be absurd,” Kihyun says. He shifts ever so carefully to lay on his side, placing Princess next to him on the mattress, who only stretches once before curling up along Kihyun’s ribs. “I sleep like the dead.”

-x-


	5. Chapter 5

Changkyun doesn’t sleep a wink. Or rather, he lays stiffly on his back next to Kihyun, who indeed does not move at all while he sleeps. Not for the first time, Changkyun wonders if Kihyun is real. He ponders the the barcode, the facility, the precise skill Kihyun has demonstrated in combat that could be developed and ingrained from years and years of intensive training -- or just programmed into his circuitry. 

But if he's a Bot, he's not like any Bot Changkyun has ever seen before, with his questions and his scars. And if he's human, Changkyun's certainly never met anyone like him, either. He looks over at Kihyun lying still on his back, the sharp slope of his nose standing out starkly against the ambient light coming in through Changkyun's window, set on Opaque. He watches Kihyun's chest rise and fall slowly with breaths, counting them. Do Bots breathe? Changkyun doesn't think so, though he knows that years of advances in technology have made it so that some Bots -- the companion ones, mostly -- are programmed so finely with human behaviors and reflexes that sometimes it's impossible to tell it's a machine.

He must lose consciousness counting Kihyun's breaths, because he blinks and suddenly it is four in the morning, and he knows this because when he blinks, the time appears in the corner of his eye in neon green and he registers the light touch of Kihyun’s fingers laid over his wrist. His left one. The metal one.

He turns his head and Kihyun is right there on his side and facing Changkyun, his eyes closed and his face serene, his hair falling softly over his forehead. He must have turned in his sleep. Princess is still between them. Kihyun's skin looks like marble, but Changkyun knows from the sensors in his arm that Kihyun is radiating heat. His chest rises and falls still in barely perceptible movements, the rhythm of his breathing slow and regular. Changkyun wonders if Kihyun dreams.

He wonders if Kihyun ever dreamed of this while he was sleeping in his hospital bed in the facility. Getting out, running away, adopting a stray cat. Princess is a white ball of fur tucked against Kihyun’s chest, and she seems to feel Changkyun’s gaze on her, because she opens her eyes into narrow blue slits to glare at him before huffing and curling up even tighter.

_ Traitor,  _ Changkyun mouths at her.

Kihyun’s hand is still on his wrist, the pads of his fingers pressed along the metal. With his eyes, Changkyun traces the stern line of Kihyun’s brows down to the pucker of his thin, pink lips, to the pronounced dip of his philtrum. The line of his jaw is as sharp as a blade. On the skin of Kihyun's neck, Changkyun sees three thin silver scars like someone or something had raked their nails down the side of his throat. 

Changkyun swallows. What had it been like in the facility? Where had Kihyun gotten those scars? His skills? 

He is afraid to move. What if he moves and Kihyun reacts on reflex, on instinct? He remembers the easy way Kihyun had taken down those guards in the tunnel. He could definitely take out Changkyun, no problem. Changkyun isn’t so bad in hand-to-hand, and he knows his way around a knife, around firearms, but most of the time, Changkyun gets by on his contracts by stealth and will. Only occasionally has he had to fight his way out of a situation, and usually, he has the advantage of a metal arm that can crush concrete in its fist and a robotic leg that can kick through walls.

With Kihyun, though, he’s not sure if brute force can really be a match against honed, deadly skill.

All the more reason why he has to keep Kihyun in the dark about the nature of his contract work. If Kihyun were to find out the truth, that there’s probably some shady crime boss who wants to take advantage of Kihyun’s skill on the other end of the contract (Changkyun’s thought of many scenarios and he keeps returning to this one) there’s no way to predict how he’d react, or what he’d do. 

He sighs and it feels like his fatigue is coming from a well deep inside of him. He looks at Kihyun again, at the way his lips turn down slightly in the corners like he is frowning at something even in his sleep. Sour guilt wriggles into his stomach. Changkyun forces it away.

_ I _ _ ’m sorry _ , Changkyun mouths to him.

He moves his wrist closer to his own side, expecting Kihyun’s fingers to fall away from him, but instead, Kihyun latches on and tightens his fingers around his wrist, and his eyelids fly open, and Changkyun thinks he sees a blue light in his irises before the door to his apartment flies in off its hinges.

“What the--!” Changkyun is tossed from the bed by his wrist as Kihyun launches himself at the intruder. Intruders. Changkyun counts five people in black file into his apartment through the wrecked door, all of them armed with rifles hoisted up against their shoulders, red lasers dancing around the room before landing on Kihyun’s body.

They fire. Changkyun screams and throws his hands up over his face, still trying to process what the hell is happening, and Kihyun moves like he's dancing on the tips of his toes, light and agile as he dodges bullets and runs towards the intruders. It's not what they're expecting. Changkyun lowers his hands when he hears an unfamiliar gargled scream, watching as Kihyun disarms one of the intruders and jams the butt of the rifle into another’s throat. He fights with precision, and the intruders are too bulky and slow, weighed down by their weapons, to retaliate in kind. In a flash, the five of them are groaning on the floor, rolling on their backs like upturned turtles flailing in their shells.

Changkyun’s ass hurts from landing on the floor there. He jumps up when Kihyun runs to him and pulls him by the arm.

“Let’s go,” Kihyun barks, voice rough.

“How’d you know--”

“Let’s go, Changkyun,” Kihyun repeats, yanking him by his arm. One of the intruders is starting to stand. As they stride past him, Kihyun kicks him in the face, and he goes down again.

Kihyun grabs a jacket hanging from a wall of hooks by Changkyun’s front door. He tosses it to Changkyun, and then he grabs one for himself, putting it on as they enter the hallway. He puts the hood up. Changkyun does the same.

As they stand in front of the elevators, the shock clouding Changkyun's mind clears and he shivers as his senses return to him.

“There’s a back entrance,” Changkyun remembers, thinking quickly.

Kihyun nods, already turning, but Changkyun freezes, eyes wide and face going pale.

“Wait -- Princess!”

“She’s here,” Kihyun says quietly. He opens his coat and Princess’ head pops out from one of the inside pockets. She meows at Changkyun as though to say,  _ hurry it up _ .

“What the fuck,” Changkyun says, impressed more than anything. He shakes his head. He’ll just have to get used to Kihyun being too good at shit like this. Right now, though, Kihyun is looking at him for answers, his eyes slightly narrowed, that wrinkle forming in his brow. There’s a pull in his navel that feels familiar, but Changkyun ignores it. “Okay, let’s go. Follow me.”

-x-

They keep their heads down. Acting on instinct, Changkyun guides them out of the building and onto the streets, where they notice pairs of guards in black monitoring the entrance from across the block or on the sidewalk corners, weapons out of sight.

“This way,” Changkyun says, turning swiftly down the street and disappearing into the entrance of a sub-level transportation hub on his block. As they descend the lit stairs, Changkyun hears the whistle of a train arriving, feels the breeze as it rushes into the station push his hair from his forehead. It’s so early in the morning that the station is quiet and still, stray flyers whirling at their heels from the breeze. There's a homeless woman sleeping on top of a pile of flattened cardboard boxes inside one of the vendor stalls lining one wall of the station. The other stalls are empty, though the lights and signs above and inside of them still flash for attention.

Changkyun gets to the turnstile with Kihyun close behind. The train stands at the tracks not even ten steps in front of them, doors open and inviting. He scans his watch at the turnstile and the gate beeps at him, sliding open and letting him through.

He turns back, eyes widening when he sees Kihyun in Changkyun’s coat, stuck behind the gate.

“I don’t have one of those,” Kihyun says, pointing at Changkyun’s watch.

Movement at the top of the stairs. Shadows that form into people. A man and a woman dressed in black walk down the stairs, and it’s the woman who notices Changkyun on the platform and points, exchanging words with her partner. Then they are running towards them.

The announcement system for the train in the station chimes. A pre-recorded message plays: “Doors closing.”

“Jump!” Changkyun shouts, gesturing at Kihyun, beckoning him, looking back and forth between Kihyun and the people at the stairs, getting closer.

“But--” Kihyun’s lips work, and his chin wrinkles like a prune as he frowns, but then he looks to where Changkyun is pointing behind him.

“Jump, Kihyun!” 

Kihyun leaps over the gate.

The gate flashes red and blares an alarm as the doors to the train begin to close. Changkyun sprints inside, and Kihyun follows, the both of them slamming into the wall opposite. The doors shut behind him. The train begins to move. Changkyun watches the people in black watching them through the windows as the train pulls out of the station, and then suddenly they’re gone, and all Changkyun can see are the grey walls of the tunnel they’re in.

“Shit,” Changkyun curses. “Shit, shit, shit!”

“Your place,” Kihyun says quietly. The train car is empty. Above them, the light fixtures are old, and they flicker with the swaying movements of the train. “It is compromised.”

“No shit, Kihyun,” Changkyun snaps.

“I’m sorry,” Kihyun whispers.

“Quiet,” Changkyun hisses, steeling himself with a deep breath. He sits in one of the empty seats by the door, and Kihyun lowers himself into the seat opposite him, his back ramrod straight. Princess peeks out from under his coat, resting her little head on his chest.

Changkyun feels like ripping out his hair. What was supposed to be a simple pick-up and drop-off situation for a huge amount of cash has turned into a nightmare. Human trafficking? Getting chased by strange men and women in black? Getting shot at? This isn’t what he asked for _or_ what he needs, regardless of what Bora thinks.

He needs to get Kihyun to Bora sooner rather than later. Needs to get himself out of this situation as quickly as he can. He made a promise to Minhyuk, after all, to get out of this business after this job, to figure out his life. Maybe he should go back and try bartending. At least the chances of someone shooting a laser gun at you with plasma bullets is pretty slim if you're a good bartender.

For him to even consider the bartending route, he has to make it out of this alive.

Across the aisle, Kihyun is stroking the underside of Princess’ chin with a look of adoration on his face as he gazes at Changkyun’s kitten.

Fuck, Changkyun thinks. Fuck, fuck, fuck.

He stands. The lights flicker above him. “Get ready to move,” he says. “They could be waiting for us when we exit.”

Kihyun, if possible, sits up a little straighter. He nods and says, “I won’t let you down.”

-x-

They wait for the train to roll into the exit before climbing out the emergency exit door at the very back of the train, lowering themselves onto the tracks and keeping to the sides of the tunnel until they get to a door. The door leads to a tiny office, which leads to a tiny hallway, which leads to the maintenance entrance of the transportation hub. No one is waiting for them there, and Changkyun is able to guide them to another block in the city, and then another, and then another, and then they’re standing at the reinforced steel gates in front of his brother’s apartment complex in the Village.

He rings the bell outside of the complex, needing his brother's access to get into the courtyard.

“Changkyunnie!” Minhyuk’s voice over the intercom sounds tired but cheerful, bubbly. Changkyun pulls the hood of his coat lower over his head. “It’s frickin’ early.”

“Hyung, not so loud,” he says. “Can we come in?”

“Who’s we?” Minhyuk asks. His voice breaks up over the speakers. Changkyun steps to the side to let the security camera see Kihyun behind him. “Oh!” Minhyuk gasps. “How exciting. You brought a friend!”

“Not really,” Changkyun mumbles. “But we need to come in like right now.”

He can hear the frown in Minhyuk’s voice. “What is this? What do you mean?”

“I’ll explain,” Changkyun promises. “Just let us in for a minute.”

Minhyuk sighs. “I’m gonna regret this, aren’t I?” But the gate buzzes moments later, granting them access to the courtyard shared by half a dozen luxury apartment buildings.

To say that Minhyuk and Changkyun live different lives would be a gross understatement. Changkyun feels it in many ways: how the people in Minhyuk’s neighborhood glance twice at him as they pass, the first time in surprise and the second time in barely-suppressed disgust like how Changkyun might look at a dirt under his shoe; how Minhyuk’s clothes are made of clean lines and silk, made to be hung prettily off a rack or mannequin more than to be worn, while Changkyun sometimes wears the same t-shirt for days at a time; how Minhyuk can actually afford to keep fresh fruit in his apartment daily.

Despite the vast divide between them, though, Changkyun has to admit to himself that Minhyuk has never once treated him like he was the dirt under his shoe. But growing up, sometimes it’s hard to discern people’s actions from their intent, especially when you’ve spent your formative years seeing yourself as less than a whole person. 

They cross the courtyard to Minhyuk's apartment building with hurried steps and enter the lobby, taking the first elevator up to Minhyuk’s floor, 24. Changkyun’s ears pop on the way up. Kihyun stands in the corner quietly, hood up, Princess tucked under his coat.

"Is this where Bora is?" Kihyun asks. 

Changkyun shakes his head. "This isn't Bora. This is Minhyuk."

The elevator comes to a stop. “Don’t say anything,” Changkyun warns Kihyun as they step out of the car, rushed and a little panicked still from the chase. “Let me do all the talking. And answering. Got it?”

Kihyun nods.

Changkyun sighs and they stop in front of Apartment 24G. He raises his finger to ring the bell but the door opens and Minhyuk beams at his brother from across the threshold, swinging the door open wide and bringing Changkyun in for a warm hug.

“Come in, come in,” he says airily. “I’m making coffee. For you and…?”

“Kay,” Changkyun says, awkwardly patting Minhyuk's back. “Just Kay.”

Minhyuk’s smile falters as he cocks his head at Changkyun, confusion making his features tighten for a moment, but he shakes it off and releases Changkyun, turning to Kihyun next. Changkyun almost laughs when Minhyuk tries to hug him. He's surprised Kihyun doesn't bring up his fists right away, and instead he stands there with wide eyes and thin lips and his hands stiff at his sides. Minhyuk draws back with a conflicted smile. Kihyun returns the smile almost exactly, like a mirror, and this throws Minhyuk off even more.

“Sure," Minhyuk says, clearing his throat. "You and Kay. Sit down, fellas. Kay, you like your coffee with cream and sugar, or black like this guy over here?”

Kihyun’s eyes widen and he looks at Changkyun for guidance. Changkyun remembers what he said in the hallway and mentally slaps himself. He know more than anyone how chatty Minhyuk is, and how curious. Kihyun keeping silent would only make Minhyuk want to pry more, and once he gets like that, he’s like a dog with a bone. Changkyun clears his throat and tilts his head at Kihyun to respond while they lower themselves onto the large dove-grey couch that takes up most of Minhyuk’s living room. Framed art hangs on the walls, the abstract kind whose meaning is completely lost on Changkyun. He prefers landscapes.

“Uh,” Kihyun says, eyeing Changkyun as Minhyuk strolls into his kitchen and starts to push buttons on his coffee maker, his back to them. “Cream?” Changkyun makes a face. “No cream,” Kihyun says. “Sugar? No! Black? Black.”

Minhyuk grins at him from over his shoulder, amused and maybe a little concerned. “You sure?”

Changkyun nods.

“Yes,” Kihyun says.

It’s barely six in the morning. Minhyuk’s apartment is quiet and serene, the aroma of freshly brewed coffee soon permeating the air. Kihyun sits on the couch the same way he sat in the train, back ramrod straight, stiff like a board. Princess is nowhere to be seen. Changkyun wonders if she’s sleeping in his coat pocket.

“Here we go.” Minhyuk returns with three mugs of coffee sitting on top of a tray made of bamboo. His hair is platinum blonde, recently dyed, and so frizzy that it’s standing up around his lead like he’s been electrocuted. But he looks so soft too, in his old t-shirt and a pair of flannel pajama pants. Last night's eyeliner is crusted under his eyes in a thin layer, the only telltale sign that he perhaps went out the night before.

Which was probably only a few hours ago, Changkyun thinks guiltily.

Minhyuk puts the tray on the coffee table in front of the couch. Two black coffees and one atrocity made of cream and sugar. Minhyuk takes the lightest colored coffee for himself and nestles into the loveseat adjacent the couch, pulling his knees up against his chest.

“So,” Minhyuk says, blinking slowly. “It’s six in the morning and you’re here with your friend.”

“Kay,” Changkyun says, trying to keep his knee from jiggling up and down.

“Yes, Kay,” Minhyuk repeats, humming into his mug. “I’m Minhyuk.”

“It’s nice to meet you,” Kihyun says like a parrot repeating after an owner for snacks.

Minhyuk laughs, the sound tinkling off the walls. “You’re cute...and this is nice and all...But again, it's six in the morning, Changkyun. Why the fuck are you here?” He sips noisily from his mug, peering at them both from over the rim.

“I can’t just visit my big brother?”

Kihyun looks between the two of them, a question forming in his eyes and his brow, but he stays quiet.

“Sure you can, but at six in the morning with a stow-away following you around? I'll have questions,” Minhyuk teases. Then, more seriously, “What’s going on?”

The thing is, Changkyun doesn’t think even he knows what’s going on anymore. He could have just brought Kihyun directly to Bora, but his feet brought him to Minhyuk. Changkyun hates feeling like he’s cornered, back up against the wall, and that’s exactly how he feels now. On one side there’s Bora and 75,000 units and a jumpstart to a new life. On the other side, there’s Kihyun and his face when Changkyun told him he was breaking him out. On the  _ other _ other side, there’s the possibility that he could just drop Kihyun off on the side of the road with some units and snacks and hope for the best and not feel too guilty about it. A man of his skill should be able to find work. He’d be able to sustain himself.

Next to him, Kihyun takes a sip of coffee and his face turns a pale shade of green. He spits it back out into the mug, the liquid dribbling from his chin and splattering into the cup.

Okay, Changkyun thinks. He’d be able to sustain himself with some guidance, maybe. Speaking of guidance —

Minhyuk watches Kihyun with a twinkle in his eye, his smile sweet and adoring. “Knew you wouldn’t like it black,” he all but coos. “Too bitter. Try some of mine?”

“No, thank you,” Kihyun says primly, wiping his lips furiously with the back of his hand like he’s trying to scrub the taste from his mouth.

Minhyuk turns to Changkyun expectantly, his face alight, and Changkyun knows that look. It’s the look that means,  _ tell me everything about this fascinating specimen you have brought before me right this instant _ . Minhyuk gets that look when he finds something exciting, and he finds many things exciting.

“I need help,” Changkyun admits with some difficulty.

Minhyuk’s face just brightens further. He puts his mug down and his feet on the floor so that he can lean forward, elbows on knees and chin in his palm. “The H word,” Minhyuk whispers.

“Yes,” Changkyun says. He bites his cheek, worrying at the soft flesh as he thinks about what to say, how to spin his story, but in the end, there’s no way around it. “Kay is the job,” he says.

It’s a good thing Minhyuk has already put his mug down because Changkyun thinks he would have dropped it if it were still in his hands. His face goes slack with surprise. Changkyun can see the thoughts swirling through his brain as the gears work, and Minhyuk looks at Kihyun and then back at Changkyun and there’s disappointment there, which hits Changkyun so deeply in the gut he feels like he’s been stabbed. “Oh, Changkyun,” Minhyuk says. “No.”

Unable to say anything, Changkyun just nods.

“I thought you dealt in parts,” Minhyuk says. “Packages and parts and the occasional Bot. But — Changkyun, this isn’t okay. You know that, right?”

“I  _ know _ that.” Changkyun stands, coffee forgotten, and stomps his way around the couch, around the back. He hates how Minhyuk is looking at him. He knows he messed up, fucked up. “I know that, Minhyuk. Don’t you think I know that?”

“Well, I don’t know, Changkyun,” Minhyuk says in his Big Brother voice, the sarcasm starting to drip. “He’s still here, isn’t he?”

“Exactly,” Changkyun says. He throws his hands onto the back of the couch, knuckles turning white as his grip tightens. “He’s still here.”

“Oh,” Minhyuk breathes. “ _ Oh _ . You didn’t bring him to Bora yet.”

“No.”

At this, Kihyun shifts. His lips part. He closes them again.

“Because you’re not sure you should,” Minhyuk reasons, looking to Changkyun for any indication he’s off the mark, but Changkyun has nothing, feels frozen at how easily Minhyuk has read him, so Minhyuk continues. “And I don’t think you should. If you do, you’re complicit in this.”

Minhyuk, as always, has a sharpness to him that lays dormant under his pretty features. It is that sharpness that has always been able to dig into Changkyun like a knife, slicing away the layers that make up the skin that Changkyun has created for himself. It is that sharpness that pricked at Changkyun every time he receded too far into himself and needed to be brought back into the world.

“What should I do?” he asks, his voice coming out in a tremble.

Minhyuk doesn’t respond right away. In the ensuing quiet, Kihyun shifts again.

“Am I not to be brought to Bora? Have I done something wrong?”

Changkyun sucks in a breath.

It's Minhyuk who says, “You haven’t done anything wrong,” reaching out his hand and placing it over Kihyun’s knee. Kihyun shies away from the touch but doesn’t move away completely, and Changkyun notices how Kihyun watches Minhyuk's hand warily, like it is a dormant spider.

“You haven’t done anything wrong,” Changkyun repeats. Kihyun releases the breath he was holding in his mouth.

“Then bring me to Bora,” Kihyun says. He stares straight ahead. “It is your objective. The longer I am with you, the more trouble I cause. I understand; you’re conflicted because you don’t know what Bora is planning. But a good soldier doesn’t ask questions. A good soldier follows orders and achieves the objective, no matter the cost.”

Minhyuk shoots Changkyun another look, this time filled with sadness. Another dart in Changkyun’s gut. Before he can say anything, though, the door to Minhyuk’s bedroom opens, and Hoseok comes out wearing just a pair of pajama bottoms, his black hair mussed and an obvious path of love bites trailing down his chest and disappearing under the hem of his pants. Kihyun is behind the couch in milliseconds, body in front of Changkyun’s, his stance like he’s ready to leap onto Hoseok with claws extended.

“Woah, woah,” Minhyuk calls out, standing too and holding up his hands, taking in Kihyun’s wild stare. “It’s Hoseok. My boyfriend. Utterly harmless.”

Kihyun grunts, shifting his weight from foot to foot, and it’s not until Changkyun puts his hand on his shoulder that the tension leaks from his body. Slowly, he comes to a more neutral stance, facing Hoseok’s bewildered expression.

Hoseok’s hands have come up to cover his nipples. For decency.

“You didn’t say he was here, Minhyuk,” Changkyun accuses from behind Kihyun.

“I didn’t think I’d have to tell you that my boyfriend stays over on occasion.” Minhyuk raises a delicately framed brow. “Besides, he won’t say anything.”

“Yeah, I won’t say a thing,” Hoseok agrees, still looking like a deer in headlights. “What’s going on? Who’s this? Why is he...guarding Changkyun like that?”

“This—” Minhyuk pauses for dramatic effect “— is Changkyun’s job.”

Hoseok’s eyes widen even more until they are circles. “You took up escort services?”

“No!” Minhyuk says, exasperated. “This is the package. His last package. The one where he said he’d stop after this one last one?”

“Minhyuk!”

“What?” Minhyuk asks innocently. “Hoseok is my partner and I tell him everything.  _ Everything _ .”

“He doesn’t need to be involved.”

Minhyuk tsks. “It’s too late, he’s involved. We were involved the moment you rang my doorbell.”

There it is again, that guilt. It sours in his stomach, acidic, cloying. If only he hadn’t gotten in that accident, if only he hadn’t followed that kid into the building, thinking he could do better and busting up his leg as a consequence, if only he could be a better brother.

“You’re my brother, Changkyun,” Minhyuk says, as though he can read his mind. “We’re family. I’m involved, whether you like it or not.” His eyes begin to twinkle. “Now, come on. You both look like a mess. Let’s get you into some pretty new clothes, hm?”

-x-

He has some old clothes left at Minhyuk’s apartment, and Minhyuk helps him find these so that he can change into them. He changes in the bathroom as Minhyuk ushers a wide-eyed and nervous-looking Kihyun into his bedroom to “transform him”.

Changkyun takes a moment to look at himself in the bathroom mirror. His nose looks particularly big today when he thinks about the refined slopes and angles of Kihyun’s face. He sighs, ducking over the sink and running the faucet to splash some water onto his face, the cool water refreshing him. He comes out in a pair of black pants and a t-shirt. His arm gets a little chilled, so he goes over to the couch where he’d left his plaid jacket and pulls it on.

Minhyuk emerges from his bedroom, face bright and smile huge, as Changkyun settles on the couch. “Are you ready?”

“Ready for what?” Changkyun asks, rolling his head back on the couch.

“Ta-da!” Minhyuk announces, jumping and waving his arms in the direction of his bedroom. Nothing happens. Changkyun smirks at the flush that appears on Minhyuk’s face. His brother pouts and lunges into the open door, pulling Kihyun out of his room. “Ta-da!” he announces again.

Kihyun stands with his arms held out slightly at the sides like a very awkward mannequin. He’s wearing a pair of Minhyuk’s old jeans that hug his ass and thighs and are rolled up at the cuff to accommodate their couple inches of difference in height. On top, he’s wearing a black sweater with a wide neckline, the material soft and flowing. And Minhyuk has done his makeup. Just some eyeliner and a little tint on his lips, but it looks amazing. Changkyun’s mouth goes dry.

“Well?” Minhyuk says, prompting his brother. “What do you think?”

“Uh,” Changkyun says with intelligence.

“The jeans are much too tight,” Kihyun complains. “How am I supposed to kick someone in the head in these?”

“Well, you’re not,” Minhyuk says, reaching forward to fix Kihyun’s neckline so that it shows just the right amount of collarbone. “Don’t you think he looks good, Changkyun?”

“I, uh,” Changkyun mumbles. He clears his throat and ignores the heat pooling low in his belly. “He looks fine,” he mutters. “But the point is that we don’t want  _ anyone  _ to look.”

He hears and sees the breath hitch in Kihyun’s chest the same moment he hears someone knocking on doors down the hall, followed by the heavy footfall of boots. Then another knock, a conversation muted by the walls. More footfalls.

His stomach falls to his feet when he realizes. “They found us,” he says.

“Who?” Hoseok asks, strolling out of Minhyuk’s room also. He scratches at his taut belly, squinting into the light.

“The people with guns who are after us. Hyungs, you have to help us get out of here.”

-x-


	6. Chapter 6

“Hello? Can I help you?” 

Minhyuk’s voice drips with honey. It’s the voice he uses when he’s trying to sweet talk an agent into giving him a booking he wants. Changkyun tries not to shudder because shuddering means moving and moving means potentially slipping off the tiny concrete ledge outside of Minhyuk’s bedroom window and plummeting down 24 floors to his death. His back is plastered to the brick wall behind him, his feet a little wider than shoulder width apart for balance, hands scrabbling every so often for purchase on the rough surface of the wall. He tries not to look up or down, just straight ahead. That way, he can fool himself that he’s closer to the ground. The clouds in the sky are thick and gray today. Looks like rain.

Next to him, a little further away from the window and thus in a bit more of a precarious spot, Kihyun stands as still as a stone, his breathing even. They left Princess inside the apartment where she promptly threw a fit and scratched up Minhyuk’s beautiful dove gray couch, but that was alright because it made it more believable that she’s lived with them all along.

Minhyuk’s genius idea was for him to sweet talk their pursuers into thinking he and Hoseok weren’t hiding anything, maybe even let them tour the apartment to prove it if they insisted, while Changkyun and Kihyun hide out on the ledge so narrow the toes of Changkyun’s boots hang past the edge. He’d seen it in a movie once, Minhyuk said. It should work.

“As you can see,” Minhyuk says inside the apartment, his voice dulled by the distance and the window between them. They must have not been able to persuade their pursuers to leave. “There’s nothing in the bedroom.”

Changkyun hears a thump that sounds like a door slamming against a wall. 

“Don’t go in there -- Hey!” Hoseok shouts. But he doesn’t say anything more. Changkyun swallows, imagining his friends held at gunpoint inside the apartment by these mysterious people in black. He wants to see. He _needs_ to see. He leans toward the window, hoping to get a glimpse through the glass.

He sees two people in black, their backs to the window, facing Hoseok, who is standing with his arms crossed in front of Minhyuk's closet door, which he seems to be guarding. He’s still not wearing a shirt. Changkyun would roll his eyes if he could do so without losing his balance. Which is when Hoseok catches sight of him and stifles a gasp.

It’s enough. The people in black notice and start to turn as Changkyun curses his stupidity and his luck, flinging himself back.

Too far, too fast. He feels his weight begin to shift, and then he overcorrects, and then his feet are slipping from the ledge. He’s so shocked he can’t even make a sound. He’s falling! He’s falling, falling —

His arm goes taut, his feet dangling in the air. Changkyun opens his eyes and sees brick. He looks up to see that Kihyun has him by his metal wrist with both hands, his face locked in a tight grimace. Changkyun doesn’t even want to think about the physics involved keeping Kihyun from toppling off the ledge with him. 

Then shadows are approaching the window. He sees Hoseok and Minhyuk behind the two in black but he knows it’s too late. He’s been seen.

“Throw me into the window,” he tells Kihyun.

“What?” Kihyun shouts into the wind.

“THROW ME INTO THE WINDOW!”

Kihyun, probably shocked into complying, swings him away from the wall, and for a moment Changkyun thinks he’s going to die after all, looking down at the ground and seeing trees like little green bushes below him, but then Kihyun swings him in the other direction, faster, and Changkyun sticks out his robotic leg, sends a silent prayer up to the skies and an apology to Minhyuk, and crashes into and through the glass at an angle so that he tumbles right into the corner of the bedroom, slamming his shoulder so hard against the wall that he actually leaves a dent. Good thing it was his metal shoulder. 

For a second, the people in black, and Hoseok, and Minhyuk, stand and gape at him. 

Then Kihyun comes crashing in through the window after him in a spray of shattered glass. Minhyuk screams, high-pitched and shrill. Or maybe that was Hoseok.

Kihyun spins on his knees and sweeps out his leg, hooking the ankles of one of the armed strangers and bringing him down hard. Then Kihyun is up and swinging his elbow around to ram into the side of the woman’s skull. She dodges by a hair, countering with a jab and hook that Kihyun blocks quickly with his forearms. When she tries to kick out the inside of Kihyun’s knee, Kihyun moves so fast it's like he teleports, shoving his whole body forward and forcing his elbow to her chin. Her head knocks back with an audible thud and clack of teeth. He follows quickly with a ridgehand to her temple, and she crumples, knocked out. 

But the man on the floor is groaning, rolling around on the floor before starting to sit up. Changkyun panics and drags the first thing he can get his hands on -- the duvet -- off the bed and flings it around his head, and the man grunts and flails under the obstruction. Kihyun positions himself in front of him, rears his fist back and pops him right in the nose. He goes down, too.

“I was counting on you to do that,” Changkyun says, brushing glass off his shoulder and shaking it out of his hair as he stands.

“Ahh!” Minhyuk screams from behind Hoseok, the both of them huddled together in the corner of the room. “Ahh! What the hell was that!”

“Are you some kind of secret agent?” Hoseok asks, less noticeably frazzled. Dazzled might be the word for the expression on his face.

Kihyun purses his lips. “...yes,” he says slowly. 

“Oh, I see,” Hoseok says in an octave higher pitch than usual.

“Do you have rope?” Kihyun asks.

“For what?”

He nods to the pair on the floor. “They’ll wake up soon. I’m going to tie them up.”

“Yeah, I have rope,” Minhyuk says. He turns around and opens the closet door. Hanging on the inside of the door in various hooks and metal loops are a variety of leather collars, silver chains, and something that looks like a harness.

“This is it,” Changkyun says. “I fell off the ledge and died. I’m in hell.”

“We’re all consenting adults. Don’t kink-shame us,” Minhyuk says with a pout. He pushes past the layer of clothes hanging on the rack in the closet and digs around in the back, emerging moments later with a bundle of pink nylon. This he hands to Kihyun with trepidation, jumping back as soon as the rope leaves his fingers. “Will this work?”

Kihyun tests the rope strength with a couple of pulls. He nods. “This will do.”

They work together under Kihyun’s quiet, clipped direction to bind the two unconscious people together. All the while, Minhyuk mutters under his breath, “I think I’m in shock. This is what shock feels like,” and Hoseok rubs a calming hand on his boyfriend's back. When they're nearly done, Princess stalks into the room, tail high in the air, curious about the noise and the buzzing tension in the atmosphere.

Changkyun thinks about how quickly they were found. He remembers the blue light he thought he saw in Kihyun’s eyes back at his apartment. And something clicks. “Kihyun,” Changkyun says as Kihyun finishes tying off a knot around the woman’s wrist, “do you think they have a way of tracking you?”

He hears Minhyuk mutter “Kihyun?” in confusion but he doesn’t care. Changkyun is watching Kihyun for a reaction.

Kihyun sighs, tying the knot over again even though he had it right the first time. Eyes lowered and on the rope, he says, “I think so, yes.”

A spark of anger ignites in Changkyun’s chest. If Kihyun knew, why didn't he say so? All this running has been in vain, and he unknowingly brought danger right to Minhyuk's doorstep -- no, into his very bedroom. He stands, towering over Kihyun on the floor. “Have you known this whole time? You didn’t think to tell me this before?”

“I wasn’t sure at first. I don’t know where it is or how to turn it off.”

“What do you mean you don’t know where it is? It’s a tracker! It probably blinks and whirs and stuff." Changkyun pauses, wishing in his anger he could have strung a more coherent sentence together. He pushes on, "Hoseok’s a mechanic. I’m sure we can find it."

Kihyun shakes his head. “Bring me to Bora,” he says, standing suddenly also so that they're eye to eye. His gaze is so straightforward and seemingly infallible that Changkyun takes a tiny step back, cowed. “Then it won’t be your problem. We shouldn’t stay here. With your family. It’ll be dangerous for them.”

“Let Hoseok search you for the tracker. We can keep running, but if it exists, they’ll keep finding us.”

“There’s no time.” Kihyun shakes his head and turns away, jaw working, agitated.

Changkyun’s brows dip. “He’s fast. He’s good at what he does—!”

But then Hoseok is shaking his head, too. “I don’t have my tools with me, Kyunnie. I left them in my studio. I could try, but if it’s internal…” He scans Kihyun up and down. “It could be almost like a surgical procedure, turning a tracker like that off.”

“Take me to Bora,” Kihyun says again. “Maybe she’ll have the resources there. We have to move, Changkyun. It’s dangerous for me to stay here. Dangerous for them.”

Shattered glass from the window lays in a puddle around them, the jagged edges catching the weak silvery light outside. There’s a shallow cut on Minhyuk’s cheek that wasn’t there before. It isn’t bleeding anymore, but the line is angry and red where the skin has been sliced open. Changkyun knows Kihyun is right.

“Fine, we’ll go,” he says with gritted teeth. “Hyung, will you be okay? What about these guys?” He nods down at their pursuers and nudges his foot against the man’s thigh.

“I’ll be fine,” Minhyuk assures Changkyun, the beginnings of his bright smile forming. “I will. You think I haven’t dealt with some weird shit as a model? I’ll call Hyungwon. He can take care of...this.” He waves his hand around over the bound pair.

“Don’t you mean the police?”

“Nope. I mean Hyungwon. He’s got. Uh. Resources.”

Changkyun looks at Hoseok in disbelief. “Hoseok, help.”

“No, he’s right,” Hoseok says. “Hyungwon has connections.”

“Can you at least make sure he doesn’t do anything stupid?”

Hoseok’s returning smile is soft and dopey. “Of course, Kyunnie.”

To Minhyuk, Changkyun reiterates, “Don’t do anything stupid,” and Minhyuk feigns offense. Changkyun holds up his hands to keep the protests from pouring out of Minhyuk's mouth. “Shut up. I’m sorry I got you involved. You’re my brother and — I’m just sorry, okay? I’ll get you — a new window.”

Minhyuk snorts and holds his hand out for Princess, who pads forward to sniff at his fingers. He stoops low to take the red charm off her collar and then crosses the distance to Changkyun, arms open. After what feels like a long pause, Changkyun inches forward and lets Minhyuk wrap his arms around him. His hug feels like home. Minhyuk squeezes, rocking Changkyun a little back and forth and humming. Changkyun releases a long-held breath as a sigh.

“Baby brother,” he says, even though Changkyun is not a baby anymore, nor has he ever been since the time Minhyuk came into his life. “You don’t have to get me a new window. Just remember what you promised me. You deserve an easier life, a better one. You deserve good things.”

“You keep saying that,” Changkyun mutters.

“I’ll keep saying it until you believe it.”

Changkyun keeps his mouth shut. He feels Minhyuk put the charm into his jacket pocket, feels the weight of it like a marble against his hip.

“For protection,” Minhyuk says. He pulls him close so that he can whisper into his ear, and it feels like those nights when he woke from the same nightmare, crying to himself and blaming himself for what had happened to their parents, what had happened to himself. And Minhyuk would hold him close in his bed and whisper fantastic stories about princes and princesses and pirates and dragons into his ear to distract him and soothe him back to sleep. He whispers, “You’re a good person, Changkyun. Don’t throw that away doing something your heart tells you is wrong.”

-x-

They stick to the alleys and narrow backways to get to Bora’s building in the Financial District, unwilling to get themselves trapped or limit routes of escape by taking public transportation. Despite how close the Village is to the Financial District, it takes over an hour of dodging shadows and circling back when one of them sees something suspicious before Bora’s building is looming before them. Kihyun is quiet the whole time, a line between his brows, the groove so deep it looks like it was carved there in stone.

When they get to the building, Kihyun follows Changkyun inside without any protest and gets into the elevator with him silently.

The quiet is too thick. Changkyun feels all the electrical pulses that make his arm and leg work rise up to the surface. If Kihyun — anyone — touched him right now, he’d probably shock them.

The elevator shakes as it comes to a stop. The door opens. A recording that sounds a lot like Serenity announces, “Fourth floor.”

Changkyun’s feet feel glued to the ground. It’s Kihyun who says, who breaks through the air thick with tension to say, “Is it here?”

“Y-yeah,” Changkyun says, feeling like cotton is stuck in his throat. He swallows, clearing away the sticky, needling feeling.

They walk out.

Changkyun guides them down the hallway to the suite door with a sign for Yoon and Kim Securities on it and pushes it open. Noise washes over them like a bubble bursting. The beeping of watches being scanned, angry contract workers protesting their wages, conversations being held at the cubicles they walk past to get to the main receiving room, where Bora sits behind a glass table with a screen behind her flashing the status of their contracts. No one turns an eye to Changkyun or Kihyun as they near Bora’s office — to them, they’re just another pair of contract workers.

But Bora smiles when she sees Changkyun, when he enters and Kihyun tries to walk in behind him. Changkyun turns and places a hand on Kihyun’s shoulder before he can cross the threshold. “Wait out here,” he says quietly. Kihyun wrinkles his nose at the order, but he nods and steps back, creating space between them. He stands by the door like a bouncer guarding the entrance, hands clasped behind his back and feet shoulder-width apart.

Changkyun goes inside and shuts the door behind him. They can see Kihyun through the glass wall of the door.

“That it?” Bora asks. She stands behind her desk. Today she’s wearing a fitted red leather dress and shoes with heels so sharp they look like knives.

Changkyun stiffens at the way she refers to Kihyun. He’d never thought of Kihyun as an ‘it’, not after he knew what Kihyun was. Hearing Bora say that makes him grind his teeth together.

“Yeah,” Changkyun says. “That’s Kihyun.”

“So it has a name,” Bora says, amused. She lifts an elegant eyebrow as she regards Kihyun, tilting her head in order to take in all of him. “I thought maybe you'd change your mind, but I didn’t need to worry about you chickening out, after all.”

“What’s going to happen to him?” Changkyun asks.

“I don’t know,” Bora says. “I just deliver what the contract asks for, I.M. You know that.”

“No,  _ I _ deliver what the contract wants.” Changkyun isn’t sure why he feels the need to emphasize that point, only that his stomach is twisting, twisting, twisting and he can’t stand the way Bora just doesn’t know and doesn’t care, the way she drags her eyes up and down Kihyun’s form outside like he’s standing on an auction block.

She sighs. “Yes, that you do, I.M,” she says, the way she might speak to a child throwing a tantrum. “And then I pay you. Lots and lots of money.”

“I’m not sure this is right,” Changkyun admits. “I’m not sure I should be here.”

“But you came anyway,” Bora says. “And now you will be paid lots of money, I.M. Which you will be able to do lots of things with.”

She’s right. The money is so good. But that twisting feeling in his stomach won't go away. Changkyun turns around. Kihyun is standing there still, obediently. Changkyun could not keep him, not with the tracker on him. Minhyuk has already gotten hurt from Changkyun bringing him around, and he doesn’t want to risk getting his brother even more involved. Changkyun couldn’t hide him. And Kihyun asked to be here. He looks at Bora, glaring, though he thinks maybe his anger isn't directed at her anymore. “What now?”

She smiles. She says, “I contacted the contract owner already. They’re going to come collect. They’re on their way, so you can bring  _ Kihyun _ to the Silver Room to wait with him if you want. Or leave him there. Once the trade is done, I’ll transfer the units to you.”

“Fine,” Changkyun grunts, turning quickly on his heel.

When he’s at the door, Bora says, her words like a whip's crack, “You’re not better than I am, Changkyun. We all have to make our way in this world.”

He wants to punch his fist right through the glass, but he can’t, so he scoffs, and says over his shoulder with his hand on the door, “Noona, maybe I'm not better. But I’m done after this. And I'll be done with you.”

-x-

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you so much for everyone who is reading and commenting it really means a lot <3


	7. Chapter 7

The Silver Room is so named because it is filled with mirrors and other shiny things. It is the third room in a line of them, all of the rooms in the hallway named after a different color or theme to make them easy to identify. There’s the Blue Room and the Rose Room and the Green Room and, Bora’s favorite, the Pink Room. Changkyun has long since gotten used to entering the Silver Room and seeing hundreds of his own faces looking back at him, but Kihyun hesitates at the threshold when the automatic door slides open.

“What is this?” Kihyun asks.

“We wait here,” Changkyun explains. It would pain him to say anything more. He swallows the bundle of needles in his throat and takes a good look at himself in one of the smaller mirrors hanging on the wall, frowning at the dark circles under his eyes, the tiny cuts along his neck and cheek he hadn’t noticed before — must have happened when he crashed through Minhyuk’s window. 

“Does it hurt?” Kihyun asks.

“No,” Changkyun says, turning his chin this way and that before the mirror to check for other hidden injuries. “I didn’t even know it was there.”

There is one plush gray couch in the waiting room, and one armchair, and a little square table in the middle with a mirror as its surface. Kihyun walks past the couch and peers into one of the longer mirrors against the wall, this one long enough to reflect the whole length of his body. He says, “It was nice of Minhyuk to lend me his clothes. Pity I’ll never be able to return them.”

Changkyun’s heart thumps painfully in his chest. He grimaces, putting his fist over it as though he could steady its beating that way. He falls onto the couch. “Don’t,” he says, tone pleading.

“Don’t what?” Kihyun turns, eyebrow quirked.

“I don’t know,” Changkyun says. It’s quiet between them. Kihyun sits down on the couch also. Changkyun puts his hand in his pocket and feels the charm brush against his fingers. He brings it out, letting it rest in the center of his palm.

“I thought we were alike,” Kihyun says beside him. His voice cuts through him like shards of glass and Changkyun startles, looking at him, only to find Kihyun looking at the charm also. Then, eye contact. The pain in Changkyun’s heart ignites into a small flame. Kihyun continues, “When you came to the facility, I thought it was a test. Then you were so clumsy, I didn’t think it could possibly be a test. It was real.”

Changkyun coughs. “Uh, rude.” 

The answering quirk in Kihyun’s lips, like a little secret only for Changkyun, makes his breath catch in his throat. "Your arm and your leg. The parts. I know them. I've seen them. That's why I thought maybe it was a test, because it was so familiar. But then you took me outside. I had seen the sky before, and the streets, and the people. But not like this."

"Like what?"

"Like I was a part of it all," Kihyun says, eyes flicking down to the charm again. “Like I belonged in the world.”

"Kihyun," Changkyun says when a chill runs down his spine at the thought of all Kihyun had had to endure for him to talk like this. He imagines he can see his own breath in front of his face, hanging there frozen and misting. "What did they do to you at the facility?"

A shadow passes over Kihyun's face. He blinks, and the light goes out behind his eyes. He says, "They were making me. Over and over until they got it right. Until I was right."

"Did they hurt you? Did they give you those scars?"

The way Kihyun glances at him, sharp and confused, his lips parted, makes Changkyun reach out to touch him. He puts his hand over Kihyun's like that simple touch could ground him. "Yes," Kihyun says definitively, and with such force that Changkyun wonders if he's ever admitted such a thing aloud before. "But it was to make me stronger. Always."

A wall of rage and anger and sadness and empathy rushes toward Changkyun like waves toward a sandy beach. "That's bullshit."

Kihyun pulls his hand away, fingers curling into his own palm in his lap. "We're not the same, Changkyun," he says. "I'm a product. Made for a purpose."

"You're not a product. You're a  _ person _ ."

"You plucked me from the facility because my bar-code matched the _package_ you were looking for," Kihyun says. "Don't try to make excuses. I know what I am. And I know what I'm not. Just as I know that Bora isn't your handler."

"What?"

He raises an eyebrow at Changkyun. "I've been trained to read body language. And lips. I saw you talking to her through the door of the office. I know you're worried about what the contractor wants from me. But don't be worried. I can handle myself. And anything is better than going back."

The resolution in Kihyun's eyes makes Changkyun feel like he’s trying to breathe underwater, like the weight of the ocean is on his shoulders. Nothing is fair in this world, it seems. He pictures Kihyun back at the facility, beaten and bruised so he could be molded like putty into something _they_ wanted, scars glistening under the fluorescent lights. Bora throwing away her morals in order to make enough money to stay afloat. Minhyuk getting turned away from agent after agent in the beginning, when he brought his mutilated brother with him to auditions because there was nowhere else for Changkyun to be. 

"Fuck this," Changkyun whispers to himself, chin to his chest. Then, louder: "Fuck this. We're leaving."

Kihyun looks up, brows furrowed in bewilderment. "What? The money--"

"I don't care about the money," Changkyun says, standing. "Well, okay. I care a little about the money, but I'll figure something else out. We're leaving. C'mon, Kihyun."

"We'll be found," Kihyun protests.

"We'll fight them off. Again and again until we figure out a way to disable your tracker. You're not going back there, and I sure as hell am not going to sell you off to some shady contractor who probably wants you to go on secret missions and use you up until there's nothing left." He strides to the door, Kihyun at his heels.

He pulls at the handle. The door is locked from the inside.

"Shit--"

"Changkyun--"

With his metal arm, he makes a fist and punches the solid frosted glass door, the blow reverberating in his eardrums. A hairline fracture appears in the thick glass, spider-webbing from the epicenter of impact. The crack turns into a fissure with his second punch. And with his third punch, the glass shatters, raining down around him in tiny crystals.

"Changkyun!"

There's a person behind the door. The stranger looks up, startled, his mouth a circle. Changkyun kicks him in the gut with his metal foot -- not hard enough to seriously injure -- and he goes crashing into the opposite wall.

"Let's go!" he shouts behind him as alarms begin to blare. Deja vu. He reaches behind him blindly and Kihyun fits his wrist into Changkyun's waiting hand. And then they run.

-x-

They dash past the elevators and crash into the doors that open to the emergency stairs spiraling down to the ground floor at the end of the hall. Halfway down a flight of steps, Changkyun peers over the railing and realizes there are people at the bottom of the stairs, all in black, pointing up at them. They're armed with guns and wearing what looks like the thick, glossy material of laser-proof and bullet-proof vests. He pivots on his heel and shoves at Kihyun, who had nearly collided into him. 

"Go, go, go!" he urges Kihyun back up the steps. They run, taking two or three steps at a time. At the fourth floor landing, the door opens, and the man who Changkyun kicked into the wall waves his hand at them.

Changkyun rears back his fist but hesitates when the man throws up both of his hands and says, "Wait! Wait, wait. Follow me. I know another way."

"Why should we?!" Changkyun barks.

The stranger nods down at the people in black, a whole line of them running up the stairs in pairs. It's the first time Changkyun registers that the man in front of them is in plainclothes. A hoodie and jeans. A cap on his head, his hair dyed golden blonde. He has a lip ring at the corner of his mouth. "I'm not with them," he explains.

It could be a trap. He could be in league with whoever is chasing them, luring them away somewhere under the guise of helping them. But then Kihyun says, "Let's go," in that definitive tone, and so they go.

The stranger joins them in running up the stairs. "On the eighth floor," he says, occasionally looking behind him to gauge the distance between their group and the group in black. "There's a skywalk connecting this building to the one across the street. I have a team there."

"Move, move!" Changkyun orders when he notices one of their pursuers pause to level his rifle at them. He hears him take a shot and ducks, the plaster of the wall next to his head exploding into little particles. More of the people chasing them pause and start to fire. One bullet ricochets off Changkyun's metal arm. "They're not shooting to stun, anymore," he realizes aloud.

"No." Kihyun sounds like he's gritting his teeth. One of the people in the pack of black breaks away from the group, leaping up the stairs and closing the distance quickly between them. On the seventh floor, he reaches their group, and with an enraged shout, launches himself at Kihyun and tackles him to the ground. Changkyun hears the crack of Kihyun's skull hitting the stairs, looks back and thinks he'll see blood, but he just sees Kihyun growling and wrestling the other man in quick, ferocious movements. Kihyun gets the man's chest between his knees and head between his hands. Changkyun turns away so he doesn't have to see when Kihyun snaps the man's neck. 

On the eighth floor, thighs burning and breaths heaving, they spill out through the door and burst into a quiet waiting area for a medical center. A hush falls over everything as the eyes of the waiting room occupants land on them, but Changkyun and Kihyun and the stranger keeping running -- out of the waiting area and into another hallway. To the left, Changkyun can see the entrance to the skywalk. Then he hears screams from the waiting room behind him, and knows that the people in black have burst through the door.

It's a straight-line-sprint through the skywalk. They dodge people walking leisurely who turn their heads in confusion as they pass them, following their path as they run, but the bystanders soon catch on to the situation, and when one of the people in black steps onto the skywalk, rifle in hand, a collective gasp and scream has everyone else on the skywalk dropping to the ground. 

Which gives their pursuers an easy target.

"Shit," Changkyun curses. He ignores the burning in his regular leg as he pushes himself to sprint faster. A bullet lodges itself in the glass wall of the skywalk next to him with an almost innocent _ping!_ After a delay of half a second, the whole glass pane shatters with a loud crash, and a fierce wind howls into the skywalk, whipping the shards around like a tornado. More screams, but Changkyun doesn't dare look back. 

Kihyun, behind him, nudges him with a hand on his waist.

"Almost there," he says.

Which is when he feels pain like fire explode in his lower back, over his hip. His legs falter and he almost trips over himself, but Kihyun is there with his arm around his waist, holding him up.

"No!" Kihyun shouts. "Keep going. We're almost there!"

The adrenaline keeps him moving a couple more steps, but the pain is too much. He feels his regular leg collapse under his weight like jello. Kihyun scoops him up under his shoulders and knees almost effortlessly, keeping up the pace.

Changkyun's head feels like it's a thousand pounds. He looks at the curtain of blood dripping down the left side of Kihyun's face, and he knows that's where his skull had hit the stairs. "You're hurt," he murmurs. 

"Shut up," Kihyun growls.

Changkyun tries to reach up with his hand to touch the side of Kihyun's face, but his hand feels just as heavy as his head. He looks at the mess of bloody hair, at the garish cut on Kihyun's temple, and then he thinks he sees a blue light shining there underneath Kihyun's skin. Watches as Kihyun's skin knits itself back together at his temple. The blood is still there, but the cut no longer exists. Changkyun blinks and the whole world tilts on its axis.

It's a strange thing, being cradled in Kihyun's arms. He feels as light as a feather even though he knows his metal parts add the weight of at least another full grown man to him.

"You’re not real,” Changkyun gasps, head lolling back. “You're so friggin' strong," he slurs. His vision blurs and starts to fade at the edges. It's worse when he blinks, his head spinning. He knows he's losing blood too quickly. In the back of his fuzzy mind, he even knows he's fading. "Leave me."

"Never," Kihyun says.

He closes his eyes as they emerge onto a deck of some sort. He feels the sun on his face, and hears the sound of propellers, the hum of something drone-like. The wind. 

Then, nothing.

-x-


	8. Chapter 8

It is morning when Changkyun opens his eyes. He knows this because there are windows like narrowed eyes in the walls near the ceiling, and there’s weak, silver light and dust motes filtering in through the glass. He’s in a hard bed, on his stomach. He feels sluggish and not quite all there, and when he sees the little tube of an intravenous drip trailing from his hand to a machine to the side of the bed, he realizes in a far-off kind of way that he’s been drugged.

And shot, he remembers. His body is in pain, but numbed from feeling it. He aches. The inside of his mouth is dry and his eyelids stick together when he blinks.

“Ah, you’re awake,” someone says. His voice is deep and full. Changkyun tries to move in order to find the source of the voice, but his body is unresponsive. “Don’t worry, the sedatives should wear off soon. You gave us a scare, but I knew you’d pull through. I can tell you’re a fighter.”

Changkyun swallows and wets his lips. “Where…?” Speaking makes it feel like he’s spitting up gravel.

“The medical bunker,” the stranger says as he steps into Changkyun’s field of vision. Large, is the first thing that comes to Changkyun’s mind. This guy is probably just as wide and muscled as Hoseok, but maybe a whole head taller than his friend. His skin is the color of desert sand. He’s wearing a white shirt that hugs and stretches across his broad chest. His muscles and stature make him a foreboding figure, but when Changkyun’s eyes flick up to his face, his smile is soft, his features kind. “You’re safe, now. I’m Hyunwoo. I run this place.”

“This place?” Changkyun tries very hard to focus. There are more words he wants to say, but he can’t quite get them out. Hyunwoo seems to pick up what he wants to know, though.

“I mean I’m the medic. We’re in Jersey,” he says. “This area used to be Hoboken before the fallout. Don’t worry — there’s no lingering radiation. That’s just a story the government tells everyone. It’s a good thing, too. Because we’ve got this place to ourselves, mostly.”

“...we?”

“Me and Jooheon and the others,” Hyunwoo says simply, eyebrows going high on his forehead. Changkyun closes his eyes and swallows, trying to shake his head slightly. Hyunwoo sighs. “Typical of Jooheon to forget to introduce himself. It’s okay; you’ll meet him later.”

The reminder that other people people exist outside of this room makes Changkyun jolt. “Kihyun—!” He groans, the sudden movement making pain crawl up his body in a slow shiver.

“He’s fine,” Hyunwoo assures him. “He’s with another team. You’ll see him later, too. For now, just rest. When you wake up again, you’ll feel better.”

Changkyun doesn’t want to go back to sleep, but he feels a cool tingling sensation in his hand and then his eyelids are drooping, too heavy. Thoughts leave his brain like clouds dissipating into the air. He sighs once, and then he’s out.

-x-

When he wakes up again it is dusk, the sky glowing orange and pink. He feels alert. His mouth is still dry. His entire torso feels like there’s been a fire left to smolder under his skin, sticky and hot. He tries to move but finds he still can’t, and it frustrates him this time to be of sound mind and paralyzed.

Oh god. Is he paralyzed? The thought leaves track marks across the front of his mind. But in his panic, he kicks his foot into the air, the non-robotic one, and sinks back into the hard mattress in relief at being able to move it.

“It’s the muscle relaxer,” Hyunwoo says. If Changkyun could jolt in surprise, he would. As it is, he just makes a noise that sounds like a grunt crossed with a scream.

“Could you not?” he asks.

“You can speak, so it’s wearing off. We didn’t want you to move and hurt yourself when you woke up.” Hyunwoo shifts into Changkyun’s line of sight, gentle smile on his round face like that of a benevolent angel. “I was told you can make rash decisions.”

“Who told?”

“Your friend told Jooheon, who told me,” Hyunwoo says.

His friend, Changkyun thinks fuzzily. Then he sees the curtain of blood drip down Kihyun’s face. Remembers how Kihyun had carried him effortlessly. “Kihyun! Where is he? What did you do to him?”

“As I said before, nothing.” Then, Hyunwoo presses his lips together and hums a little, reconsidering. “Well, mostly nothing. We — well, you’ll see.”

“If you hurt him in anyway, I swear to you—!”

“We didn’t hurt him,” Hyunwoo assures Changkyun. “And we won’t. We won’t hurt you, either, even though the first time you saw Jooheon, you threw him into a wall.”

“I  _ kicked  _ him.”

“Yeah, that’s better.” Hyunwoo bites back a snicker.

Changkyun feels like his mind is a pile of mush. All that he can think about is how he wants to see Kihyun, and how strange it is that he’s not dead after being shot. “I want to see Kihyun,” he says, realizing suddenly that his brain-to-mouth filter is pretty much nonexistent currently.

“Give it another hour,” Hyunwoo says gently. “Then you’ll be able to go see him yourself.”

“What? But, I was...shot,” Changkyun says dumbly, looking at Hyunwoo like he’s not sure if he has eyes in his head. But Hyunwoo has them, smaller and more narrow than Changkyun’s eyes but apparently functioning all the same.

“You were indeed shot, and the nanites should be done stitching you up in about an hour.” Hyunwoo looks at a spot on Changkyun’s back and nods to himself.

Changkyun, against his better judgment, tries to crane his head to look, but a lancing pain like a muscle spasm has him gasping into his pillow.

“Don’t move,” Hyunwoo chides, amusement making his words light. He chuckles. “Your sense of self preservation is to be...questioned.”

“I have very little.”

“That’s what I mean.” He hums again, in consideration. “Well, you made it here, though. That’s something.”

“Kihyun dragged me. Actually, he carried me like I was his bride, I think. I told him to leave me.”

“And what’d he say?”

“He said, never.”

“Hm,” Hyunwoo says.

“This isn’t fair,” Changkyun gasps. The words are trickling out of his mouth like he’s a leaky faucet. “You can’t interrogate me by surprise like this. I’m on truth-drugs!”

“Despite all of mankind’s advances in technology, the truth serum remains elusive,” Hyunwoo counters. “You’re just on muscle relaxers now. And localized anesthesia.”

“Why can’t he come to see me?” Changkyun whines.

“Because you’re in surgery, Changkyun,” Hyunwoo explains to him as though he’s a child. “It’s standard procedure.”

Changkyun pouts into his pillow. “I’ll be bored for an hour,” he says, “you should just put me to sleep again. What are nanites?”

Hyunwoo grins and it makes his eyes look like they are closed. He kind of reminds Changkyun of an adorable, muscular puppy. “Do you want me to put you to sleep or do you want me to tell you what nanites are?”

He thinks maybe Hyunwoo is teasing him, but Changkyun ponders his question as best he can. He remembers the haze in his brain from earlier, how everything had felt very far away, even his thoughts. “No, don’t put me to sleep. Tell me about these nanites.”

“They’re like microscopic robots,” Hyunwoo says. “We injected billions into the site of the wound. They’re tasked with stitching you up.”

“So I have billions of tiny foreign parasites in my body right now.”

“You kind of always do,” Hyunwoo assures him. “The nanites are able to manipulate their own molecular make-up. We programmed them to reshape themselves into...well, you.”

“How -- how does that work?”

Which prompts Hyunwoo to go in depth into the history and discovery of nanotechnology, its intersection with biomechanics, Jooheon’s breakthrough discovery that today allows the nanites in Changkyun’s body repair him from the inside out. Ten minutes into Hyunwoo’s enthusiastic history and science lesson, Changkyun falls asleep.

He wakes up on his back, staring up at the ceiling. He hears the beeping of a heart monitor next to him, slow and steady. He sits up without any pain, mouth open on an inhale, marveling at how normal he feels.

Hyunwoo sits in the armchair beside the bed, and he shifts when he notices Changkyun’s movement. He grins. “There, good as new.”

-x-

Hyunwoo gives him privacy to change into a gray sweater that is too long for his arms and a pair of soft black pants cuffed at the ankles. He gives him new socks and a worn pair of boots that have clearly seen other feet. “Your clothes were all bloody,” Hyunwoo explains, when Changkyun asks for his old clothes. He steps out of the doorway to find Hyunwoo waiting for him in the concrete hall, dangling lights strung up crudely near the low-hanging ceiling every few steps. There are no windows, but there is a yellow sign right across from him in the hall with the words FALLOUT SHELTER in bright red in the center.

“Looks like we’re not in Kansas anymore, Toto,” Changkyun mutters to himself.

“What was that?”

“Nothing, old reference,” Changkyun says, clearing his throat.

“Yeah, ‘cause Kansas isn’t even on the map anymore,” Hyunwoo reminds him. “And my name isn’t Toto.” He straightens and checks Changkyun over. At his full height, Hyunwoo is almost a head taller than he is, with shoulders twice as broad. Though Hyunwoo makes him feel small in just about every way, Changkyun takes a bit of comfort in reminding himself that his fist can probably punch through these walls. “Follow me,” Hyunwoo says, turning sharply on his heel.

He walks so briskly that Changkyun has to break into a jog to keep up. This hallway is empty and short, and he notices stairs at the end and a few other doors leading to other rooms and halls underground. Changkyun wonders if there are other patients. Wonders if Kihyun had been in one of these white rooms, recovering. “Where are we going?”

Hyunwoo throws a smirk behind his shoulder at Changkyun as they come upon the stairs. “Outside.”

The larger man pushes open the door at the top of the steps to blinding light. Changkyun throws his hands up in front of his face, halting in his tracks and blinking against the glare. It takes a moment for his eyes to adjust and for him to realize he’s not staring at the sun, but that he’s looking instead directly into the floodlights shining into the entrance of the medical bunker.

It’s night by now. He steps out onto grass. He looks up at the sky where, in the inky darkness, he can see pinpricks of light. Stars. Changkyun gasps and wanders out farther into the field, away from the floodlights. Hyunwoo pauses behind him, letting him take in his wonder.

In the city, there are no stars. There’s smog and smoke and dust. Dead debris in the air. A perpetual cough in your lungs. Changkyun lifts his hand into the air, high above his head, and spreads his fingers. Stars between his fingers. He makes a fist, like he could grab them from the sky and put them into his pocket.

“Changkyun.”

Changkyun drops his arm and spins around with a gasp. Kihyun stands just outside of the circle of light provided by the floodlights, parts of his face in shadow. He’s wearing the same gray sweater as Changkyun, the same pair of soft black pants. He is so pale he looks like he’s glowing, like the moon is hiding just under the surface of his skin.

Changkyun moves. He registers Kihyun’s look of surprise but it is too late by then; his arms are already around Kihyun’s shoulders, their chests pressed tightly together. _He’s here, he’s alive, he’s safe._ They both are. His eyes well up with tears, and he blinks them away, but his voice is thick when he says, “Kihyun -- thank you.”

“For what?” His voice is like a breath whispering over Changkyun’s spine.

“For not leaving me behind.”

Kihyun softens in Changkyun’s arms, and Changkyun feels the weight of him as he allows himself to lean against Changkyun’s body. He says, “You are the only reason I had that choice to begin with.”

It’s quiet. His skin warms where Kihyun touches him, and this close, when he inhales, he smells metal, and dirt, and blood clinging to Kihyun’s skin. Underneath that, there’s the smell of alcohol and disinfectant, and underneath that, lingering like an afterthought, is the earthy note of Changkyun’s almond-scented body wash. He can feel Kihyun’s heart beating. Neither of them move, just breathing against each other. It’s strange to be so still, so close, and yet.

And yet, Changkyun thinks. After being on the run for their lives for the past few days, he finds peace in Kihyun’s pulse.

“Are you alright?” Kihyun asks quietly, his breath tickling Changkyun’s ear.

“Yes,” Changkyun says. “The nanites fixed me right up. Whatever those are. And you--?” Changkyun freezes, remembering what Hyunwoo had said during one of the spells when Changkyun was fuzzily awake. He pulls back to hold Kihyun’s shoulders at an arm's length and frantically searches his body. “They did something to you. What did they do?”

At first, Kihyun’s eyes widen at Changkyun’s wild searching, but gradually his lips grow into a smirk, and he catches Changkyun's hands in his by his waist, stilling his jerky movements. “I am fine,” Kihyun says, promises. “They removed the tracker.”

“What? How?”

“It was here.” Kihyun pulls up the sleeve of his sweater and shows him the inside of his left wrist, where there is now a long, silver scar that wasn’t there before. “If I’d known it was there, I would have dug it out myself.”

“Don’t say shit like that,” Changkyun snaps, taking Kihyun’s wrist into his own hands and looking more closely. The skin is puffy and tender to the touch, too soft, like it could break with the kiss of a feather.

“Like what?” Kihyun asks, slightly breathless.

“Like you don’t care if you get hurt.” He trails his finger down the scar again. It’s rougher in some patches, where the wound was deeper. Changkyun is amazed it has already healed. “Did they use the things -- the nanites -- on you, too?”

Kihyun chews on his bottom lip. He pulls his wrist out of Changkyuns hands and rubs at the scar, twisting his palm around it, like a nervous tic, and Changkyun frowns. “Not exactly. They didn’t need to,” he says slowly.

“But it’s healed.”

“Yes,” Kihyun says. “Because I--”

“You’re both here, just standing in the dark,” someone says behind them, startling them both. As they turn, Kihyun instinctively moves closer to Changkyun, shielding him with his body. The stranger continues, “We’re about to turn the lights out and I was considering just leaving you here to fend for yourselves, but I figured it was time to introduce myself and maybe feed you.”

Standing just inside the circle of light is the man Changkyun kicked into the wall. Same golden blond hair, hoodie, and cap. He grins, lip ring glinting. “I’m Jooheon,” he says. “Follow me.”

-x-

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> chapters are catching up to what i've got written so far, so updates will be slower from here. thanks for your patience <3


	9. Chapter 9

They follow Jooheon across the field of spiky, long grass to the entrance of another underground bunker. Looking around now, Changkyun sees a dozen or so of these concrete bunkers jutting out from the ground. One by one, the floodlights illuminating the paths in the grass to them begin to go out. He realizes he doesn't know when Hyunwoo left him -- when he heard Kihyun's voice, everything else had fallen away for just a moment, and Hyunwoo could have disappeared into any one of these structures.

The heavy metal door groans as Jooheon pulls it open, and Changkyun counts thirty steps as he takes them down to the floor of the bunker, his head throbbing a bit as his eyes adjust to the harsh lighting inside. The door creaks and slams shut behind them, and the green news feed in the corner of his lens flickers like a dying lightning bug before disappearing completely.

He blinks a few times, but the news feed doesn't return. "You're not connected," Changkyun observes aloud.

Jooheon's shoulders shake in front of him. "No," he agrees. He's grinning when he looks over his shoulder at the pair. "We’re off-grid in the bunkers except for a few areas. We try to use suppressors to limit tech use up top. You're quick, aren't you?"

"No calls in. No calls out,” Changkyun realizes, a seed of distrust planted in his belly. He won’t be able to contact Minhyuk while he’s down here, and Minhyuk won’t be able to contact him. He hopes above all hope that his brother and Hoseok are okay, but there’s nothing he can do about it in this moment. “What is this place?"

"Shelter," Jooheon says.

Kihyun can't seem to decide if he wants to walk in front of Changkyun protectively or stick close to his side, shuffling between the two positions. In the end, Changkyun reaches out and takes the fringe of Kihyun's sweater between his fingers, tugging at him to keep him near his hip, and they share a glance that feels simultaneously full of meaning and unreadable. Kihyun's cheeks turn slightly pink, and he sighs shortly when he forces his gaze away.

They continue down the hall towards noise, towards conversations echoing off concrete walls, towards the smell of food -- sweet onions and aromatic garlic and the hearty scent of roasted meats and vegetables, earthy and full. Changkyun's mouth waters.

"Shelter from what?" Changkyun asks, licking his lips.

"When this was built? From the fall-out," Jooheon explains. "Now? From...everything. People end up here for a lot of different reasons."

Kihyun glances sharply at Changkyun again before narrowing his eyes at Jooheon's back. "And why have we ended up here?"

As though sensing Kihyun trying to burn a hole through his hoodie with his gaze, Jooheon turns again, smile light and amiable, cheeks rounded and flushed slightly. "More to come on that front,” he says mysteriously, grin like a kitten’s. Then he says, almost tauntingly, “Project KH-1122-0004, you don't remember me?"

Kihyun throws his arm out and catches Changkyun across the chest, knocking the wind out of him and making him fall back a step. Jooheon's stance is easy, open, facing them completely now. Hands down by his hips, palms up. Kihyun looks him up and down, nostrils flaring.

"C'mon KH," Jooheon says. "I know I'm in there somewhere."

"My name is Kihyun," Kihyun grits slowly through his teeth.

Jooheon's eyes flick to Changkyun's. "Interesting," he says, but Changkyun doesn't know what's so interesting about it. He tries to push against Kihyun's arm at his chest but Kihyun's as still and immovable as a statue. Jooheon continues, "Kihyun, then. So maybe you don't remember me. That's okay. Just means there’s so much more I need to explain." He turns back around, muttering something to himself before starting to walk again. Kihyun and Changkyun look at each other.

Changkyun can see the confusion swirling like a storm behind Kihyun's eyes. "I don't know him," he whispers to Changkyun, the corners of his lips heavy with doubt. "Do I? Should I?"

"It's okay," Changkyun assures him. He takes Kihyun's wrist into his hand to remind him he's here with him in this strange place where grass grows freely on the ground and bullet wounds are healed within hours and stars hang like juicy fruits ready to be plucked from the sky. "We'll be okay."

The storm clears slowly. Kihyun nods. He says, "You just healed from a gunshot wound. Don't be reckless."

Ahead of them, Jooheon whistles and spins on his heels, gesturing to his right.

"You're hungry, right?" he asks brightly. The narrow hallway opens up into a large, cavernous room filled with benches and tables. People sit in groups or pairs at the tables, eating off of metal trays. To one side of the room is a kitchen, where half a dozen men and women are busy tending to the stoves with pots bubbling with soups and stews, to the ovens where pasty, colorless dough emerges golden brown and piping hot on sheets of metal. The temperature is noticeably warmer in this room, but no one seems to mind. "Let's eat. And talk. Eat and talk. I'll explain."

-x-

Jooheon guides them to the line in front of the kitchens, handing out metal trays to them both from a stack at one end of the room. "Fill up," is all he says, and they all proceed down the line, holding their trays out for scoops of food to be plopped onto them. There's rice and stews, stir-fried vegetables and simmered meats. Changkyun's mouth keeps watering as his tray grows heavier with food. He still doesn't entirely trust this place, but at least he's going to be fed.

As they near the end of the buffet, Changkyun peeks over to Kihyun's tray, eyes widening. "You gonna finish all that?"

Kihyun shrugs. His tray is heaped with rice and veggies all over, along with kimchi stew in a little bowl in one section and what looks like multiple strips of fried chicken in the other. Changkyun hadn't even seen fried chicken being offered. "One of the ladies said I looked too skinny," he says.

Changkyun scoffs. They follow Jooheon to an empty table near the corner of the mess hall and sit beside each other, Jooheon across from them.

At first, they just eat. Changkyun hadn't realized how hungry he was, but the first bite of rice tastes like manna in his mouth, like gold-leafed heaven on his taste buds. He moans, savoring the taste, the steam from the rice coating the roof of his mouth. Each bite is a new experience. The kimchi stew is rich and flavorful and spicy, and the vegetables are so fresh that they still crunch between his teeth. He chews vigorously and swallows too fast, making himself hiccup. In a matter of moments, half of his tray is clean. He looks over to Kihyun, who is faring similarly on his rice and veggies.

"Aren't you going to eat that?" Changkyun asks, pointing to the untouched chicken.

Kihyun pauses with a spoon of rice halfway to his mouth. He puts it back down and stares at the pieces of meat with a hint of wariness in his expression.

"It won't bite you," Changkyun teases.

"Shut up," Kihyun says, snatching up a piece of chicken with his fingers. He watches Kihyun take his first bite of chicken, watches his nostrils flare slightly, his eyelids flutter. Watches how a switch flicks on in his brain at the experience. "What is this?" Kihyun asks, voice reverent.

"Fried chicken," Jooheon says. "You like?"

Kihyun stuffs what looks like a whole drumstick into his mouth in response, and Jooheon laughs -- not in jest, but in shared joy.

"It's good, isn't it? Not just the chicken, but everything. Fresh. We actually grow some of our food out here. We can't live off of it completely just yet, but we're getting there." Kihyun stuffs a wing into his mouth next, and the bones come out clean. Jooheon says, "Take it slow, though. You'll make yourself sick."

"Not a chance," Kihyun says, digging in without stopping.

Jooheon eats with less gusto and more calm. There are people who stop to wave at him or exchange a few words as they enter or leave the mess hall, and he's friendly with them all. Clearly, Changkyun can surmise, he is well-liked here, maybe even a leader of sorts.

When Changkyun is finished with his food, Kihyun goes back for seconds. He returns with mostly chicken. "Jooheon's right, you know," Changkyun warns. "You'll make yourself sick."

"This is the best thing I have ever eaten," Kihyun states.

"So you like fried chicken. Noted."

"Fried chicken wasn't really on the menu where you came from," Jooheon offers.

"Which, yeah," Changkyun starts. "How do you know that?"

A pause. Jooheon takes a breath and releases it, pushing his clean tray away from himself on the table so he can fold his arms over each other on the surface. "Because I came from there, too," he says. "Well, I mean, I worked there." Changkyun shoots up out of his seat but Jooheon already has his hands up, tone placating when he continues, "Wait -- Hear me out. I worked there. There's a reason I don't anymore. Please, sit." He tilts his head down at the seat. “I have so much to tell you -- I don’t even know where to start.”

Kihyun has stopped eating. He's looking at Jooheon with dawning realization and familiarity. And then recognition spreads across his face like a drop of ink dissipating in water. "Lee," he whispers. "Dr. Lee."

"That's right, Kihyun."

"You worked on another project," Kihyun says. "But sometimes you would be there, during group observations. Dr. Wang talked about you sometimes with me. You were friends."

"I was friends with him, yes," Jooheon says gently. He nods encouragingly at him, as though trying to pull the memories from his mouth like thread from a spool. "What else do you remember?"

"You were kind," Kihyun says. "You disappeared one day. Dr. Wang stopped talking about you."

"I was fired, actually," Jooheon says. "And I was threatened. Someone sent a pipe bomb to my apartment. They were after my life. So when I saw how dangerous things were getting, I arranged a few things and disappeared."

Changkyun lowers himself back into his seat. "What do you mean? Why were you threatened?"

"I thought the research we were doing was going to help people. Make incredible medical advances. Save the world. All that stuff. But they were just building tech so that people could be weapons. I didn't agree with that. It was wrong. I was going to expose them for what they were doing, and they didn't like that." He smiles sardonically, bitterness dripping behind the expression. "I tried to get Wang to expose them with me, but he was scared of them. I guess he was right to be."

"Weapons?" Changkyun asks. He looks at Kihyun, whose shoulders are stiff and nearly by his ears. He can see it. Kihyun is a weapon. He's even said it himself. _I'm a product,_ Changkyun remembers Kihyun saying. _Made for a purpose._ "For what?"

"What else do you need weapons for?" Jooheon asks.

"To hurt people," Kihyun whispers at the same time Jooheon says, "War."

"Soldiers," Changkyun says in an exhaled breath. "Mercenaries."

"And a whole lot of them, too," Jooheon says. "Soldiers-for-hire that could be created, that were strong and skilled, that couldn't be hurt."

"You're wrong," Changkyun says. "Kihyun can be hurt."

"But he heals quickly," Jooheon points out.

"That doesn't mean he doesn't hurt!" Changkyun retorts, slamming his fist on the table. The trays jump and clatter on the surface, and Kihyun flinches but Jooheon doesn't even react.  

"I know, Changkyun," Jooheon says calmly. "I know. That's why I had to leave the project. I couldn't be a part of it anymore."

"You wanted to expose them."

"I did."

“And who’s ‘them’?"

"Yang Corporation is the research facility," Jooheon says. "Its biggest private donor is Zhang Technologies."

A ringing starts in Changkyun’s ears. His arm. His leg. His tablet, the lens in his eye. Now, Kihyun. All sticky threads of the spider's web that is Zhang Technologies. The web he can never escape. Of course. He remembers being approached by a stranger in a suit at the hospital. Remembers him saying, “It’ll cost you a leg, literally.” His smile that looked like it had been cut into his face. “It’s in the final stages of development, so you’ll be our test subject, in a way. But you took the arm well, so it should be fine. Look at it this way, kid. You’ll get your body back at a subsidized rate.”

Subsidized, his ass. But Changkyun had been so delirious on painkillers and so close to the edge of something that felt dangerously like oblivion that he’d accepted. He couldn't afford not working, not with Minhyuk just starting to find success, now unburdened with taking care of his younger, accident-prone brother. So he signed his name on the dotted line. Like signing a contract with the devil.

He looks at Kihyun, who has stopped eating his chicken, the corners of his mouth shiny with grease. “You’re Zhang Tech,” Changkyun whispers like an accusation.

Kihyun frowns, eyes tilting toward Changkyun's arm and then his leg. “You are, too.”

“I’m not,” Changkyun says, holding his metal spoon so tightly between his fingers that it starts to bend. “They gave me this arm, this leg, but I’m still -- me. I had a life before this arm, before this leg. I’m no Bot.”

“I’m no Bot, either,” Kihyun says.

“What?”

“ _I’m no Bot, either_.” Kihyun swallows, looking at Jooheon, who is leaning forward with his elbows on the table. “I'm still me. I was raised in the facility. I grew up there. With my -- brothers. The other me’s. One by one, they all got sick, or hurt. But not me. I was the strongest.” His fingers starts to tremble. “I know I’m not a Bot, because I have memories of growing up. Bots don’t grow up like that, right? I'm not a Bot.”

But Jooheon doesn’t say anything at first, jaw working as though he’s chewing on his words, and the shaking only gets worse.

" _Right?_ " Kihyun demands of Jooheon. His eyes are wide but the color has drained from his face, and his fingers grip the edge of the table so hard that his knuckles are white.

Changkyun reaches out and tentatively puts his fingers over Kihyun’s wrist. “Hey, I'm sorry,” he starts slowly, softly. “I shouldn't have said that. Breathe.”

Kihyun tries to -- breathing in through his nose and out through his mouth in slow, practiced rhythm, staring at the spot where Changkyun's fingers touch his skin.

“You’re not a Bot, Kihyun,” Jooheon says finally. “You’re a clone who was genetically engineered to be able to re-uptake the nanites -- that I created -- into your system. That’s why you’re so strong. That’s why you heal.”

“I feel sick,” Kihyun whispers. His face turns the same shade of pale green as when he drank Minhyuk’s black coffee. He stands suddenly, wrenches his wrist out of Changkyun’s hold, and stumbles unsteadily toward the entrance of the mess hall, where different kinds of trash bins line the wall. Changkyun watches him pitch himself over one of them at his waist and empty his stomach into the lining.

Changkyun hisses at Jooheon, “This is your fault.” They stands and go to Kihyun together. “You still haven’t told us why you contracted someone to steal him.”

“Funny how you use the word ‘steal’,” Jooheon says, “when I thought of it as a rescue. But it’s a lot, I know.” He grimaces as they reach Kihyun, who’s still being sick at the bin. “Maybe it’s too much at once. Definitely too much right now. You need to rest. Recover. I’ll show you where you can stay tonight. Know that you’re safe here. I can tell you more and answer all your questions in the morning.”

-x-

“I’ve been poisoned,” Kihyun groans from the bed where he’s lying curled up on his side in pale blue flannel pajamas. Jooheon brought them out of the mess hall and led them to another part of the underground network of bunkers to a hall lined with double rooms on both sides, a communal bathroom at the end of the line. The set up reminds him of prison cells, but he doesn’t voice this out loud.

They brought Kihyun to the bathroom where he showered, got sick again, washed his face and his teeth, guzzled water, and finally felt stable enough to settle into one of the beds in the room they would be sharing for the night, exhausted. Now, Changkyun lays in the bed opposite Kihyun’s, wearing pale blue pajamas as well, his breath minty after brushing his teeth.

Inside the room there are two beds separated down the middle but close enough that if Changkyun were to reach out his arm across the distance he could take Kihyun’s hand in his. There’s a light overhead on the dimmest setting and a dresser that had four sets of clothes inside — two sets of the pale blue pajamas and two sets of gray sweaters and soft black pants.

“It’s not poison,” Changkyun chides gently. “You ate too much chicken and your stomach isn’t used to fried foods. We told you to take it easy.”

“I’ve never felt like this before,” Kihyun says miserably, clutching at his stomach.

“Never? Come on. That’s inhuman.”

“I’m not human,” Kihyun says. His eyelids flutter closed like he can’t bear to look at Changkyun. “I'm a clone. Every part of me was manufactured.” He sighs shakily. "A part of me always knew it."

“You _are_ human,” Changkyun says. “Even if you're a clone.”

“You believe him.” It’s not a question, the way Kihyun says it, but Changkyun answers him anyway.

“He knows you, and you remember him. So I think I do. And you’re just as human as I am.”

Kihyun doesn’t respond, and Changkyun watches the slow rise and fall of his chest. Even on separate beds, they are so close, facing each other, that Changkyun can see the movement of his eyes behind his eyelids. “We still don’t know what he wants,” Kihyun points out.

“I believe him, but I don’t trust him just yet. At least we can rest a bit while we figure out what to do next. We know he wants to stick it to Zhang Tech somehow...Honestly, I wouldn't be against that...” Changkyun mutters, thinking aloud. The mattress is hard and uncomfortable. He shifts positions a few times, restless, before laying on his back and staring up at the light. He thinks he hears it buzzing. “Can we turn the light off?”

“It reminds me of the facility,” Kihyun says. “The light. This bed. I could never sleep until I was awake in the morning. Sometimes I wondered if maybe they drugged me.”

Changkyun turns his head. Kihyun’s eyes are still closed, shadows painted underneath them. “Did they?”

“Every Monday Dr. Wang would take me up to the tenth floor for treatments. One for the nanites, a couple to make sure my body wasn’t deteriorating from the inside out because of what they were putting inside me. Sometimes he would sedate me, but he — wasn’t like the other doctors. He tried to be kind.”

“How do you mean?”

A hint of a smile forms at the corners of Kihyun’s lips. His eyes open and find Changkyun’s, their color deep and rich, like amber and dark honey in the half-light. “He’d take me up to the roof when he wasn’t supposed to. He told me stories. He showed me movies. Sometimes I think that’s why I made it when the others didn’t. Dr. Wang tried to treat me like a human.”

“You are human,” Changkyun says, his voice like a growl. He has a feeling he could say this a million times, as many times as Kihyun needs in order to believe it.

Kihyun says, “I don’t have a family. No brothers like you have Minhyuk. Isn’t that what makes you human? Your connections to other people. Outside of the facility, I have no one. I'm no one.”

Changkyun’s throat suddenly feels dry, and it’s difficult to swallow. The truth is, what Kihyun says hits him to his core, because there are more days than not where he feels more machine than person. Like everything that’s happened to him has chipped away at his personhood, his soul, and when others noticed this they tried to fix him with metal parts. He even tried to fix himself this way, because everything could be fixed with the right code, the right sequence. Except now, looking at Kihyun and seeing his reflection in the other's eyes, Changkyun feels all out of sequence. He is the boy in the bus as it crashes and he’s the boy under rubble, he’s the bird in the shoebox under his bed, he’s the Bot in the alley with no skin over its face, skeleton laid bare. When Minhyuk tells him he deserves a better life, a good one, Changkyun doesn’t know how to respond because—

Because.

Because ever since he could remember, he's felt like he's been living on borrowed time. Like maybe he shouldn't even be here. 

Which is probably how Kihyun is feeling right now, too.

He clears his throat and reaches across the little space between the beds separating them. His hand reaches Kihyun’s, and he places his palm over Kihyun’s slightly curled fingers. “You have me,” he says, wanting it to be true. “We’ve got each other, now.”

It’s difficult to sleep that night in the bunker, the weight of the earth threatening to collapse all around them, but this gravity pushes them closer together, too, and neither of them let go.

-x-


	10. Chapter 10

No one comes to wake them in the morning, but the lights turn on automatically, mimicking the sunrise, and Changkyun wakes gradually to crust in his eyes and to the soft scuffing sounds of footsteps down the hall outside of their room. His neck is a little stiff from sleeping on his side all night, and his hand is still draped over Kihyun's, skin warm where he’s touching him.

Kihyun’s eyes are half-lidded and dark. They don't speak. It doesn't feel like they need to. They’re both awake and the words spoken last night linger in the air over them both like a protective shroud.

Changkyun rolls over onto his back and Kihyun's hand slips from his and people walk past their door holding murmured conversations with each other, and it reminds Changkyun of the dorms at school, before he dropped out. He wonders if there are any classes here. If there are teachers and students and even families -- how big this underground network of bunkers and outcasts seeking shelter is. He's not sure how long he lies there on his back thinking about nothing and everything, letting all his thoughts come and go in his mind like leaves in a stream. 

Finally, Kihyun whispers, "We should see if there is anything to eat," and Changkyun realizes he is hungry.

Begrudgingly, they roll up to sit on their beds. Kihyun's hair is flat on one side and a flared mess on the other, and Changkyun is sure his own isn't faring any better. He attempts to brush his fingers through his hair, hoping to tame it somehow. "Do you think we should change?"

Kihyun shrugs, standing. He shuffles over to the door, movements strangely small and lethargic, and passes his hand over a sensor to the side of the doorframe so that the door slides open. People walk past, some of them looking into the room, waving and offering polite smiles. Most of them are wearing civilian clothes -- just the kinds of clothes and outfits Changkyun would see on the streets around his apartment. Abruptly, Kihyun passes his hand over the sensor again and the door shuts, hiding them from view. He turns around and pads over to Changkyun's bed and sits next to him without a word, the mattress bouncing from his added weight.

He's so close. Changkyun's body tilts toward his. Their shoulders brush. Kihyun's hand wanders over to find his as he draws his knees up to sit cross-legged on Changkyun's bed. "I don't want to go out there yet," Kihyun confesses. "I think -- the chicken." Kihyun's eyes are dim, and he won't look up to meet Changkyun's gaze.

Realization dawns over Changkyun like the flicking of a light. He squeezes Kihyun's fingers lightly in his. "It's okay to be a little scared or nervous," he offers. "That was a lot of people."

"I'm not scared," Kihyun says a little too quickly. "I don't get scared. Or nervous. It isn't allowed."

"Of course it's allowed. It's very human -- to feel scared or nervous when faced with something new or different. And you've faced a lot of new and different things lately." Kihyun says nothing, but Changkyun can tell from the wrinkle of his mouth and the furrow of his brow that the metaphorical gears are working quickly in his brain. He squeezes Kihyun’s fingers again, patient. "Tell me," Changkyun whispers encouragingly.

Kihyun sighs, shoulders sagging, and for the first time Changkyun realizes how narrow Kihyun is, rail-thin and small. Kihyun's always been so quick and powerful that Changkyun's never realized they're basically the same size, that Changkyun might actually be bigger.

"I think," Kihyun begins haltingly, eyes focused on where Changkyun's thumb is rubbing soothing circles over the back of his hand, "for the past few days, we've been on mission. There's been an objective the whole time and I know -- I know objectives. I can complete them. And now that mission is gone. I don't know what to do next."

He looks up and Changkyun almost feels like he's looking at himself after his accidents. That same lost expression haunts his gaze. That same longing for comfort and proof that he's not alone lies nearly hidden and barely reachable behind layers of grief. Other people might see emptiness, but Changkyun sees that Kihyun's walls are down for the first time in a long while, and that this might be Kihyun when he doesn't have to think about when and how to throw his next punch, Kihyun when he doesn't have to keep looking over his shoulder for threats, senses hyper-vigilant. That this is Kihyun when he first wakes up in the morning, a little lost and confused, the Kihyun who would tell Changkyun about his dreams.

"You're feeling directionless," Changkyun guesses, only because he's felt the same so many times before.

Kihyun stiffens, and then he nods.

"Then I guess..." Changkyun thinks, humming to himself. "Our next mission is to acquire breakfast. How does that sound?"

Kihyun stares at him, and Changkyun flushes, feeling foolish. He didn't really think he could resolve everything Kihyun is feeling by reducing it with such a flippant statement, did he? But the longer Kihyun stares, the softer his gaze grows, and then he's smiling, blinding Changkyun with all his teeth out in a straight, white line. _He has a nice smile_ , Changkyun finds himself thinking, sudden and unbidden. It makes his chest feel warm.

"That sounds like a reasonable mission, Changkyun," Kihyun says. "Shall we get started?"

-x-

The mess hall is filled with hungry people in varying states of consciousness, sitting alone or in small groups at the tables, eating what looks like porridge and sides of pickled vegetables. Changkyun guesses there are easily over a hundred people here, eating together. It should feel a bit claustrophobic with the low ceilings and poor ventilation, but instead it feels warm and cozy. They pass by a family of four eating at one table, and the little girl looks up and grins at Changkyun with her mouth still full. Charmed, Changkyun waves and is rewarded with a happy shriek as she realizes his arm is made of shiny metal.

He and Kihyun get in line for the buffet and each grab a tray, holding these out as they shuffle down the line for the workers behind the buffet to spoon rations out onto them. There’s a small bowl for the porridge, and sections in the tray for the kimchi and the pickled radish.

“I think I haven’t eaten this well or regularly in ages,” Changkyun mutters quietly enough so that only Kihyun can hear.

Kihyun looks at him out of the corner of his eye as the woman in front of him ladles out a healthy serving of kimchi for him. “Is that why you’re so small?”

Changkyun sputters like an engine turning over in a car. “What? We’re the same size! You’re smaller, even.”

Kihyun just grins at him, cheeks sharp, eyes glinting. And Changkyun realizes Kihyun is  _ teasing  _ him. Wow.

They walk together to find seats so they can eat, and Kihyun’s steps are purposeful and quick; this time, it’s Changkyun who skips to follow him at his heels.

“Excuse me? When did you get a personality?” he asks when Kihyun hones in on a pair of seats at a half-empty table near the wall and sits. The tray clangs as he places it on the flat surface and takes his seat opposite Kihyun.

“It’s developed over time,” Kihyun says with an even tone and flat expression.

Changkyun rolls his eyes, digging his spoon into his porridge and nearly scalding his tongue on a big bite. “How -- hah! It’s hot -- come it’s only coming out now?”

“I suppose it’s because we’re not running anymore,” Kihyun says, taking a much smaller spoonful and blowing on the porridge with pursed lips, lifting an arched eyebrow at Changkyun as though to say,  _ this is how it’s done, idiot _ . “And we’re here, and no one is chasing us.”

Changkyun frowns, running his scorched tongue over his teeth, thinking back on the men and women in black who chased after them. If they weren’t with Jooheon, does that necessarily mean they were with Zhang Tech? It would make sense that Zhang Tech would want their research, their product -- however it is they see Kihyun -- back by any means, especially if there’s the danger of their unethical research and practices being brought to the public’s attention if Kihyun were to remain free. But what if there are other people after Kihyun, people they don’t know about? There’s something strange about waking up and getting breakfast like it’s a normal, everyday thing after constantly running for your life for the past few days. Something that doesn’t feel quite right. He spoons some more porridge into his mouth, chewing thoughtfully, wondering if there’s any way he can get in touch with his brother in this compound.

“Kihyun, what do you make of this place?”

Kihyun finishes the last of his porridge and puts his elbows onto the table, slouching slightly. They decided to change out of their pajamas and into the only other outfits they had, and he looks so different wearing the soft gray sweater, his dark hair a bit of a mess. He just looks like a boy. A boy with very nice cheekbones and pink lips.

He leans forward and Changkyun mirrors him, instinctively drawn. Kihyun says quietly, “I think Jooheon-sshi wants something from us. And he is biding his time and testing us before he makes his ask.”

“What do you think he wants?” Changkyun asks just a quietly.

“Isn’t it obvious? Our help.”

“But how can we help him?”

“From the way he talks about it, he thinks he has put himself in a position to create change. He just needs a change agent--” Kihyun freezes in his thought, peering at something or someone over Changkyun’s right shoulder.

A shadow falls over Changkyun and he turns in his seat, curious about what’s caught Kihyun’s attention, and sees Hyunwoo towering above him. He’s wearing dark jeans and a forest green sweater and Changkyun flushes, recalling how Hyunwoo had seen Changkyun at his loopy, medicine-induced worst, face down and probably butt-naked on the operating table. Hyunwoo just fills out that sweater so nicely.

“Oh, Hyunwoo-sshi, right?” he tries to ask coyly, some porridge inexplicably caught in his throat and making his voice squeak on the last word.

But then a metal tray flies past him and in the direction of Hyunwoo’s face. Luckily, Hyunwoo’s reaction time is impeccable, and he catches it with the palm of his hand with a loud clang. Food goes flying everywhere. A bit of kimchi lands in Changkyun’s hair. Changkyun barely has time to yell before Kihyun is launching himself at the much larger man, somehow having leaped so high into the air that his knees and elbows lead the charge, aimed at driving down on Hyunwoo’s chest.

Hyunwoo side-steps Kihyun by a hair, and Kihyun lands as lightly as a cat, shifting nimbly on his feet and swinging his foot up to Hyunwoo’s face. The larger man blocks this as well, with his forearms, grunting, and then from there Changkyun can’t follow the blur of punches and hooks and kicks and blocks traded back and forth between them.

“Stop!” he shouts. People are hushed, staring. A couple of the people staring are starting to stand up, starting to come toward them -- either to get a closer look or to intervene. “Stop! Kihyun!”

But the fury in Kihyun’s fists and in his eyes seems to have created an impenetrable wall in his ears, and Changkyun’s shouts do not reach him.

Hyunwoo’s head whips to the side when Kihyun’s knuckles collide into his jaw, but he’s back so fast with his own hook that sends Kihyun flying across the floor, disoriented. Hyunwoo follows closely, and then he’s got Kihyun in a headlock, his smaller body held tight against his broad chest. “Stop,” Hyunwoo bellows into Kihyun’s ear. “You’re scaring Changkyun.”

“Let go!”

“Not until you calm down,” Hyunwoo says.

After a few breaths, Kihyun stops struggling against Hyunwoo’s iron hold, chest heaving, cheeks red. When he’s calmed down enough, Hyunwoo releases him, and Kihyun jumps away from him like Hyunwoo’s a live wire, fists at the ready. His eyes flick back to Changkyun’s, and, seeing he’s safe, he faces Hyunwoo again. “Shownu — what are you doing here?” he hisses.

“Same as you,” Hyunwoo says, holding his hands out, palm up. A gesture of peace.

“How did you get out?”

Hyunwoo sighs, stepping forward but pausing when Kihyun takes a step back like a magnet repelled. He reassesses, taking a look around the quiet, still room. Changkyun’s eyes dart between them, confused.

“Nothing to see here,” Hyunwoo says, raising his voice a little to get the attention of the others in the mess hall. “Get back to your meals, everyone.” It takes a long moment, but eventually everyone shuffles back to their seats. Conversation picks up again. All that remains of the fight is Kihyun’s tray and the sorry spray of kimchi on the floor. Hyunwoo turns to Kihyun when it seems like normalcy has returned to the cafeteria. “It’s nice to see you again, too,” he says.

Changkyun, feeling awkward in the rising tension, stoops over to pick up the tray and put it back on the table. He finds napkins on the table and cleans up the kimchi remains with them. “Kihyun,” he tries again, because Kihyun kind of looks like a dog at the end of its leash, baring his teeth and growling at something unseen on the other side of the fence.

“He’s with Zhang Tech,” Kihyun explains.

Hyunwoo, palms still up, doesn’t deny it.

Changkyun asks, “How do you know that?”

“Because we were at the facility together, Changkyun,” Kihyun says, teeth snapping. “We trained together. We fought. It was always between me or him.”

Hyunwoo shakes his head. “Kihyun--”

“And you made sure it was always you.”

“I didn’t have a choice,” Hyunwoo says patiently. “Same as you.”

Kihyun scoffs, distress evident in the tightness around his eyes and mouth. “Fuck you,” he barks out, loud enough for the sound to carry like a gunshot throughout the room. There is another moment of heavy silence as the shock of the words ripple, before the white noise of conversation starts again, this time seemingly stilted and forced. Hyunwoo narrows his eyes. “I learned that word from Changkyun,” Kihyun says with his nose in the air.

“Let’s not do this here in front of all these people.”

“Yes, let’s not do this,” Kihyun says, taking another step back, and then another. He turns finally and stalks out of the mess hall, not even sparing Changkyun a glance. Stung, Changkyun moves to go after him, but Hyunwoo puts a hand on his shoulder, stilling him.

“Jooheon wants to see you,” Hyunwoo says.

“So?" Changkyun asks, head whipping back and forth between Hyunwoo and Kihyun's forms. Kihyun's back grows smaller and smaller as the distance between them grows. "I have to see if he’s okay,” Changkyun responds, trying to shake Hyunwoo’s hand from his shoulder but finding it immovable.

“He’ll be fine. He can’t go far,” Hyunwoo promises, digging his fingers in slightly into the meat of Changkyun's shoulder. “We’re all safe here at the compound.”

-x-


	11. Chapter 11

Jooheon, Hyunwoo helpfully explains, is waiting for them in the medical bunker. Hyunwoo guides Changkyun from the cafeteria to the fields above ground, where the sun is hanging in the sky and shining weakly through the mist and fog that blankets the flat expanse of the compound. Now in the daylight, Changkyun looks around and sees the same entrances to the bunkers he saw the night before like molehills in the field, but a little off in the distance as though guarding over these entrances, he sees buildings too — stark, concrete structures standing sturdy and strangely whole above the grass.

“What’s that?” he asks, pointing at the buildings while also scanning the area for Kihyun. No sign of him.

Hyunwoo pauses and looks over his shoulder, squinting slightly. “Nothing,” he says, shrugging. “Those buildings are empty. This whole place used to be hospital grounds. The fallout shelters were connected so that the hospital workers could quickly evacuate patients if needed. But now there’s nothing left in those buildings except for old faulty wiring.”

“I see,” Changkyun says, giving the buildings a lingering glance. For a couple of empty, useless buildings, the facade seems new, the windows reflective and unbroken. There’s a large garden to the side of the buildings, and a small grove of fruit-bearing trees. That must be where they grow some of the food Jooheon was talking about. Beyond all that, behind the buildings and the gardens, the woods begin. Changkyun takes it all in. It seems almost too good to be true. A sustainable shelter who welcomes the disenfranchised with open arms? Why hasn’t he heard of this place before?

He scampers after Hyunwoo when he realizes that the other man has continued to the medical bunker without him. “Hey!”

Hyunwoo grins at him when he catches up. “Short legs,” he comments, and Changkyun flushes, not sure if he’s angry or embarrassed.

“Not all of us can be built like Adonis.”

“Not Toto?” Hyunwoo asks, referring to one of their first conversations. Changkyun can hardly believe that was only yesterday.

“Toto was a dog,” he explains. “A small one at that.”

Hyunwoo chuckles. “Got it.”

They reach the heavy door to the medical bunker and Hyunwoo opens it, the steel and concrete screeching against each other. He gestures for Changkyun to go down first. He does, wondering what Jooheon wants with him, what he wants with Kihyun.

“Turn left at the end of the hall. He’ll be in one of the rooms down that way.” Hyunwoo’s voice echoes in the cavernous space and seems to expand within Changkyun’s chest as he speaks. Changkyun jumps a little as he walks, realizing that Hyunwoo is so close behind him he can almost feel the heat radiating off his skin.

“You don’t have to breathe down my neck,” Changkyun quips. "There's only one way in and out."

He senses Hyunwoo pause behind him as he clears his throat before following again at a more reasonable distance. “Sorry,” Hyunwoo says quietly. “Habit.”

“Weird habit,” Changkyun notes aloud, though internally he catalogs this information for later. “What was that back there anyway? Between you and Kihyun. He called you something different. Shownu.”

“We knew each other at the facility,” Hyunwoo says evenly.

Changkyun snorts. “I gathered. And? Why the different name? Why does he hate you?”

Hyunwoo seems hesitant to answer, dragging his words out, but eventually he admits, “I was called by a different name at the facility. Shownu was my project name… I learned from Jooheon that Hyunwoo was the name of the original. The original me.” He leaves the rest of the story unsaid, but Changkyun quickly fills in the blanks for himself: Hyunwoo is like Kihyun. A clone, a copy, a soldier. Jeez, Changkyun thinks a little bitterly, is everyone in this place a victim of Zhang Tech?

“As for why Kihyun hates me… We trained together frequently. I won. Often.”

Hyunwoo explains it so succinctly that Changkyun knows there’s more to it than that. Here is another layer of Kihyun’s history that he has stumbled upon, that he itches to peel back and know. It tugs at him like a hangnail. But when he looks behind him briefly — just to catch Hyunwoo’s expression, just to try to read him — he finds his eyes shuttered and dark, the way Kihyun would look sometimes when it was clear he didn’t want to answer Changkyun’s questions, when it was clear the memories and wounds were gouged so deeply into him Changkyun could almost see the track marks like they’d been left on his own body. So he backs off. For now.

He spots Jooheon anyway, behind a sliver of window in the door to his right. He’s sitting bedside, but Changkyun can’t see who’s in the bed. Changkyun leans forward, trying to peer inside and catch a glimpse.

As though sensing he's being watched, Jooheon swivels in his seat, standing and walking towards them and raising his hand a bit in greeting when he realizes it’s Changkyun and Hyunwoo outside the door that slides open with a slight grinding noise as he approaches it. Jooheon winces, grinning sheepishly. “Gotta fix that,” he says, stepping out quickly and pressing his palm over the panel beside the door. The opening shuts behind him quickly. Changkyun tries to look over Jooheon’s shoulder again and spots a couple of lumps under white covers — little feet, he guesses — but nothing more, when Jooheon shifts into his line of sight, blocking the sliver of window. He clears his throat and says, “You had breakfast?”

“We did,” Changkyun says, taken aback. “Hyunwoo found us in the cafeteria.”

“And KH — Kihyun, I mean?”

“He’s…”

Hyunwoo pipes up behind Changkyun. “He ran off. I’ll go find him.”

Changkyun turns abruptly, eyes wide, recalling the scene that just happened at breakfast. “I’m not sure that’s a good idea?”

“We have a lot to catch up on,” Hyunwoo says softly, a gravity and weight behind his words. “And it’ll be better to do it now than later.” To Jooheon, he says, “I’ll be around.” They nod at each other, and before Changkyun can voice any more of his protests, Hyunwoo leaves them, disappearing around the corner in the hall.

A moment passes, followed by the sound of the bunker door screeching against concrete as it opens and closes.

“He’s short with his words, but he means well.” Jooheon is smiling softly, his arms crossed in front of him. He’s wearing jeans again today, and a navy long-sleeved shirt that hugs his body, the sleeves rolled up to his elbows. Changkyun notices the rope-like muscles of the other man's forearms, surprised by the tight cords there. At first glance, Jooheon seems soft, his cheeks rounded and a little pudgy, lending to his young and innocent appearance, but it seems that underneath his charming smile and his clothes, he's much bulkier than would be expected.

“I don’t mind Hyunwoo,” Changkyun says, shrugging. “I mean, I have very long, profound conversations with my cat. And she’s certainly short with her words.”

Jooheon stares for a second, and then he snorts. His lip ring glints under the lights as he throws his head back and laughs. “I take it Hyunwoo and Kihyun’s reunion was a bit--”

“Charged?” Changkyun finishes for Jooheon, accusation in his tone.

“That’s a word for it.” Jooheon waggles his eyebrows, sobering.

Changkyun is not impressed. He mirrors Jooheon’s crossed arms and presses his lips together. “Who’s in there? Hyunwoo said you wanted to talk.”

Jooheon waves a hand behind him dismissively. “A patient,” he explains. “They’re not doing very well...we’re thinking of moving them.”

“Where?”

“You’re curious, aren’t you?”

Changkyun grunts and changes tactics. “You still haven't told us much about this place. What do you want with us? With Kihyun? You’re not telling us everything.”

“I found this on you when you came to us,” Jooheon says, not answering Changkyun’s questions. He reaches into his pocket and brings out the red charm that used to hang around Princess’ neck, holding it in his palm for Changkyun to take. “It’s for protection, isn’t it?”

Changkyun considers the charm, remembering Minhyuk’s words in his ear as he slipped it into Changkyun’s pocket.  _ You’re a good person, Changkyun. Don’t throw that away doing something your heart tells you is wrong.  _ What is his heart telling him now? He takes the charm from Jooheon, holding it carefully between both hands, fingers smoothing over the silky red ribbons and tassels. “Something like that,” he says.

Jooheon says, “Seems to be working so far.”

“I’m not sure about that,” Changkyun admits, pocketing the charm. “Kihyun seems to be doing a better job than the charm.”

“You’ve grown attached.”

Changkyun blanches, feels heat crawl up to his cheeks at Jooheon’s direct, targeted words. “He’s saved my life a couple times, so yeah.”

“And  _ he’s _ grown attached to  _ you _ .”

Changkyun doesn’t say anything to that, but he does think about the way Kihyun looked when he held him on the grass outside the bunker under a blanket of stars. How warm he’d been, how he could feel Kihyun’s heart beat against his chest. He thinks about Kihyun’s small, gentle touches, the way they fall into step beside each other.

“A lot has happened over the past few days,” Changkyun says quietly.

“You asked what I wanted with you and Kihyun.”

“Yeah.”

Jooheon shifts on his feet. “Walk with me.”

Frowning, Changkyun follows Jooheon down the hall, and they stop at the door just two rooms away. Jooheon presses his palm over the panel to the side of the door, and the door hisses slightly as it opens. They enter, and at first Changkyun thinks he’s been transported back to the facility.

Six beds and figures in half of them, the rhythmic beeping of machines monitoring heart rates and blood pressure and other bodily functions, lights dim and the air thick with the burden of the dying. He stops in the center of the room, wondering if he’d find the same face on each of the figures lying in the beds.

“What is this?” Changkyun whispers.

“Projects CY-1127-0002, KS-0112-0004, and LH-0420-0002. Or — Chanyeol, Kyungsoo, and Luhan.” Jooheon points to each figure as he repeats their names.

“Projects…”

“Earlier incarnations of Zhang Technology’s research efforts,” Jooheon explains, approaching the bed to their right. He gestures for Changkyun to follow, and Changkyun does, though at a careful, wary distance. “I think in the beginning, they really did want to help people. With Chanyeol, they were testing the body’s immune system. Its ability to defend against infectious disease. They went through five versions of him before they moved on.”

Chanyeol lays on his back, a respiratory mask covering half of his face, the covers pulled up to his chest. Though horizontal, Changkyun can tell Chanyeol would be tall standing, certainly taller than Changkyun himself, but his cheeks are bordering on gaunt and his skin is a sickly sallow color. The bruises under his eyes are purple. He looks away. Jooheon has moved on to the next boy, across from Chanyeol in the room.

“This is Kyungsoo.”

The first thing Changkyun notices is that Kyungsoo’s black hair is shorn close to his scalp, and his skin is slightly mottled in some places, purple and gray. It looks like he’s deteriorating from the inside out. Changkyun feels a gag get caught in his throat.

“With Kyungsoo, they thought bigger. What if your body could heal itself quickly and in more ways? Not just from disease and infection but from wounds, even fatal ones?”

“You’re talking about immortality,” Changkyun says. “That’s crazy talk.”

Jooheon cocks his head as though he’s considering the word. “Not immortality, exactly, but something close to it. What if you didn’t have to die?” He walks over to the last boy, and this boy is different. He’s a little pale but his cheeks are rosy and full, and his hair is sleek, if a little messy. His eyes move behind closed eyelids. There’s a vitality to him that doesn’t exist in the others, as though he could spring from the bed, awake, at any moment. “What if the people you loved didn’t have to die?” Jooheon asks, and Changkyun thinks of Minhyuk, and he thinks of Hoseok.

And then he thinks of Kihyun.

“This one's Luhan,” Changkyun says, remembering the names Jooheon listed before. “You love him?”

Jooheon shakes his head. “Not me, but his original was certainly loved.”

“By who?”

“By Zhang himself,” Jooheon says. “That man...did all this because of him. He found a way to monetize it, too.”

“What’s wrong with all of them?”

“What’s wrong is that none of them were successful. None of them could bring Luhan back, not in the way Zhang wanted...so he threw them away. Well, his researchers threw them away when they moved on to the next project.”

“You mean…?”

“With each iteration of the project, the clones got better. Healthier. They were getting closer. But it was never enough. There is always something in the way they were put together that makes them fall apart too quickly. I managed to get these guys out before the end, and I’m trying my best, but they’re still deteriorating. All of them.”

Changkyun suddenly can’t breathe. The air is too thick in here, too cloying. It reeks of rot. “So Kihyun will — is Kihyun deteriorating, too?”

“As far as I can tell -- no,” Jooheon says. “He’s different.”

“How?” Changkyun asks, breathless. “Why?”

Jooheon sighs, eyes roaming over the readings in the machines by Luhan’s bed. “I don’t know,” he admits. “But it’s what I -- we -- want to find out.”

A pit of dread forms in Changkyun’s stomach, hard and gnarly as a peach’s. “You want to study him.”

Jooheon says, “He could be the key. To everything. He could help so many people. Don’t you want that? To help people?”

“What about Hyunwoo?” Changkyun argues, starting to inch away from the beds. The walls are starting to look like they’re closing in around him, and he’s suddenly hyper-aware of how they’re surrounded by tons and tons of earth and concrete. “He told me he’s like Kihyun. Why don’t you study him?”

“Though he's not showing the same symptoms as these clones, it's no use. He’s more like you than like Kihyun. He’s more metal than man,” Jooheon says. Changkyun tries not to let Jooheon’s flippant remark get to him. It’s a fact that Changkyun has parts of him made of metal. There’s not much he can do about it now. But he still has a heart and a brain and a soul of his own. “His model was...a one-and-done kind of deal. He’s meant to be a closer. You send him in to clean house. He doesn’t heal as well as Kihyun does. At least, that’s what I heard. You could do anything to Kihyun and he’d bounce back.”

“He doesn’t just bounce back. He’s got scars all over,” Changkyun whispers while backing away still, horrified and remembering how Jooheon talked about Kihyun’s abilities before.

Jooheon, who hasn’t moved from Luhan’s side, freezes him with a sharp, piercing stare. “If your brother was the one who’d lost his arm in the crash, or his leg in the rubble, and you knew there was technology out there that would almost seamlessly help him regenerate and regain use of that limb, wouldn’t you want to give that to him?”

Twisted metal and searing heat. Changkyun remembers now the smell of burnt rubber and flesh, how his arm had been crushed in between the shattered window of the bus and pavement. How Minhyuk had cried with him, covered his eyes so he couldn’t see their parents next to them, unmoving and still as they waited for rescue. He thinks of Kihyun, growing up in a sterile facility facing unnamed horrors all on his own, wounds healing quickly only to be reopened again. Like losing his arm over and over again, or his parents, or Minhyuk.

Changkyun swallows, feeling sick, reaching for the solid weight of the door behind his back as Jooheon closes the distance between them. “I’d ask what the cost is,” Changkyun says, his voice rasping as though the words have to be squeezed out of him. “There’s always a cost, and I’m not sure I’m willing to let someone else pay it.” The jewelry in Jooheon’s face catches the light and Changkyun’s breath freezes, realizing something. “Wait — how did you know all that about me?”

The pit in his stomach hardens and condenses even further into its own tight little diamond, and Changkyun feels the air around them drop a couple of degrees at his question. Jooheon’s eyes narrow slightly as his fingers come up to stroke at his chin thoughtfully.

“I had a lot at stake on the contract. I had to do my research, and believe me, I was thorough.” Jooheon smiles, the curve of his mouth slightly wicked, like that of a recalcitrant school boy facing the teacher he’s tormented for weeks. “You were the best candidate. The only choice, really.”

“Did you have anything to do with what happened at Minhyuk’s?” Changkyun spits, forgetting about the door behind him. He feels electricity buzz through him, static and live, and clenches the fist of his metal arm as though to contain any wayward sparks.

Jooheon shakes his head. “Definitely not,” he says, but Changkyun has no way to tell if he’s lying.

He thinks back on the facility, Dr. Wang and how he’d been the one who Changkyun has impersonated, getting out with almost no tail, having reprieve for half the night before Changkyun’s apartment had been compromised. Minhyuk’s, the shattered glass of his windows, what could have happened after. Does Jooheon know it all? Things led up to the compound so quickly — how much of it could have been orchestrated by a single mastermind behind a long game? How long has Jooheon wanted Kihyun?

“All right,” Changkyun finally says, allowing his shoulders to relax and his fist to uncurl, choosing not to voice his suspicions aloud. Jooheon’s eyes gleam in delight. “So you want Kihyun for your medical research. And you’re telling me all this because…?”

“I saw it right away,” Jooheon says.

“Saw what?”

“What I said before. The bond you have with him. He listens to you. He’ll cooperate, if we’ve got you.”

A spike in his heartbeat as he senses the meaning behind Jooheon’s words. “Cooperate?”

“With the research,” Jooheon explains.

“And if he doesn’t?”

Jooheon smiles beatifically and cocks his head to the side. “He’ll listen to you,” he says, reaching into his pocket again. He draws out a chip, no larger than Changkyun’s thumbnail, shiny as chrome. He flips it up into the air like a coin and Changkyun startles, reaching his hand out in order to catch it, and it lands in his palm. It’s warm, thrumming. “75,000 units. The cost.”

Changkyun swallows. "This wasn't part of the deal.”

“So will you help us, or not?”

“I need to think about it,” Changkyun says, buying time, warily training his eyes on Jooheon’s hands when he raises them. Jooheon just chuckles, holds his palms out in a show of peace, and presses his palm against the panel beside the door. The door slides open behind Changkyun, and a gust of cool air rushes in.

“Of course, just don’t take too long,” Jooheon advises. “Lives depend on it.”

.


	12. Chapter 12

The chip burns hot in the center of Changkyun's palm, and when he curls his fist around it, he can feel the hard edges digging into his flesh. 75,000 units in the space of his fingernail. A life-changing amount of money, really. Changkyun has plans with it. Had. He was going to use it to pay down what he still owes for his leg, maybe move out of his tiny apartment, buy a climbing castle for Princess. But now the money burns in his hand and gives him a sour feeling in his gut. 

The sun beams down on him from above as he walks from the bunker, unsure of his destination and only knowing that he has to move, that he can't stay still. Everything that Jooheon has told him, shared with him, churns in his mind. Grass crunches underfoot as he thinks about Zhang Tech, the facility, breaking Kihyun out. Now he knows the history behind how Kihyun came to be, and the body count leading up to his existence. He thinks about Luhan, his clone lying in the hospital bed in the medical bunker, his beauty effervescent. He must have been very special and very loved, or else Zhang must be a crazed, sad little man. Or maybe both. It is possible to be both.  It makes Changkyun sick that he's now inadvertently a part of the larger machine feeding Zhang's twisted ego and dreams. 

He reaches a space where tall grass gives way to dirt, and twigs, and patches of moss. Looking up, he realizes he’s reached the edge of the woods that he first noticed behind the abandoned hospital buildings, and when he turns to scan the landscape before and behind him, he sees that the woods span nearly the whole perimeter of the compound, a natural barrier and fence.

This is a cage, Changkyun realizes. A cage they walked right into -- or in Changkyun's case, that he was carried into -- that will feed them and clothe them if they want. But they’ll never be free. Kihyun will never be free. Not here.

He raises the chip in his fist with a growl and rears his arm back, but something stops him from throwing the units from his hand. It's a lot of money, even if it's dirtied by the circumstances around which it was earned. There's a lot he could do with it. Maybe not for himself, but maybe for Kihyun and Minhyuk and Hoseok and the people he loves. And so he’s left frozen with his normal arm in the air when Kihyun emerges from the shadows between the trees, appearing so suddenly it’s as if he’s materialized out of thin air, and finds him at the edge of the woods.

“Jesus Christ,” Changkyun hisses, lowering his arm quickly and curling it defensively across his chest.

Kihyun walks toward him, appearing unharmed. “Changkyun,” Kihyun says simply as a greeting. It is strange to see him move so stealthily and yet he's wearing soft flannel and a pastel-colored top.

“Where did you go?” Changkyun asks, heart starting to beat faster at his appearance. “Why’d you run off like that?”

“I--”

But Changkyun isn’t finished. He presses forward and gets right into Kihyun’s space. “You could have been hurt! What were you thinking? What if those people are still after you?!”

“Changkyun--” Kihyun’s eyes widen. He takes quick steps back as Changkyun advances on him until he can’t anymore, his back flat against the thick trunk of a tree, his hands curled against his sides. 

“You don’t get to run off like that again!” Changkyun yells. If he took another step he’d be stepping right on top of Kihyun’s foot. Changkyun catches the tight, grim expression on Kihyun’s face and guilt and regret rushes through him, sapping him of his anxiousness. He realizes something very important, and sucks in a slow lungful of air to calm himself. “I was worried about you,” he finishes more quietly. 

The breath catches in Kihyun’s chest. Changkyun takes a step back to give him space, so he’s not crowding him, but it’s Kihyun who shoots out his hand to catch him by the wrist and tug him back, who crushes him in a hug. Changkyun buries his face in Kihyun’s neck and inhales again as Kihyun’s arms tighten around him.

“I’m sorry,” Kihyun says quietly. “I won’t do it again.” He sounds like he means it.

Changkyun slips the chip into his own pocket and throws his arms around Kihyun’s shoulders. They are of height, so it’s easy to fit his body against Kihyun’s and just to breathe together, taking comfort in each other in this strange place. 

After another minute, Changkyun sighs. “I’m sorry I yelled at you.”

“It’s okay,” Kihyun says.

“No, it’s not. I didn’t do it out of anger, but I still shouldn’t have yelled like that.”

“You got your point across, though,” Kihyun says lightly. He chuckles and Changkyun sinks into him further, relaxing against him when he realizes Kihyun’s gently scratching his blunt nails over the nape of his neck. 

“Where’d you go?” Changkyun whispers.

Kihyun hums in thought. “Did some reconnaissance,” he says.

“Which means?”

“I needed to cool off. I went exploring.”

“Did Hyunwoo find you?”

Kihyun’s arms tighten around him. “Yes.”

“Okay,” Changkyun says, rubbing at the curve of Kihyun’s shoulder with his good hand absently. “You can tell me about it, or not.”

“I will tell you,” Kihyun says tightly. “But later.”

“Okay,” Changkyun says again. Then, hushed and evenly, “When you left, I went with Jooheon, and I learned some things about this place and what he wants… In your recon, did you find anything interesting?”

“Yes,” Kihyun says.

“What?”

“An electric fence around the entire perimeter of the compound. The only place I didn’t check for the fence was around the old hospital. Shownu -- Hyunwoo, I mean -- was lurking there. Oh, and an apple tree. I threw an apple at Shownu’s head. Bounced right off.”

So the woods aren’t the only fence around the place; there’s an  _ actual  _ fence keeping them and the other residents of the compound inside. Was Jooheon ever going to tell them that information, or had it slipped his mind? Jooheon had framed their conversation in the bunker as giving Changkyun a choice, but now he realizes he doesn’t really have one. Whether he chooses to stay or not, he doubts Jooheon has any intention of letting either of them back out on the other side of the fence.

“Kihyun, what would you do if I told you we have to leave this place? Would you come with me?”

“Of course,” Kihyun says without any hesitation.

“Do you trust me so much?” He pulls back to look at Kihyun, at the way his expressions change and flit across his face as he thinks. He watches as Kihyun's lips press together into a thin line, and then as his eyebrows slant toward each other, and then as he puffs out his cheeks and blows out air from between pursed lips.

“It’s not about trust,” Kihyun says slowly, hesitantly, like the words are coming to him through molasses. “It’s something else. You’ve risked your life for me. I’d do the same for you whenever, wherever. We’re each other’s now. Does that make sense?”

Changkyun feels a tug on his heartstrings, and he imagines it’s their veins trying to knit themselves together across skin and tissue and bone. It is a revelation that he looks at those pink lips and for the first time thinks he would very much like to kiss them, to feel if they are as soft as they look. 

“Yes,” he says. “It makes perfect sense.”

.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry for the short chapter :(


	13. Chapter 13

They don't go back to their room in the bunker yet. They need to talk, and Changkyun isn't sure he can trust that their room isn't bugged. He tells Kihyun as much, and Kihyun nods in quick understanding. So Changkyun starts into the woods from where Kihyun emerged and finds a thin, lightly worn trail for them to follow.

“Where does this go?” he asks Kihyun, who overtakes him to walk in front of him. As the path narrows from the head, the trees press in on them on either side.

“To the hospital.”

They walk side by side when they can, but often, the trail grows narrow, the trees thick around them, and soon they are bathed in shadows, the sun dappling light through pinpricks in the dense canopy of branches and leaves above, and they have to walk one behind the other again.

After another long stretch of walking in almost complete silence, Changkyun takes a breath to say something, anything, but Kihyun pauses in the trail and Changkyun nearly runs into his back. "Oof," he says, a little belatedly.

“There's a little clearing ahead.” Kihyun looks behind his shoulder at Changkyun, expression soft. “Do you want to stop there?”

“Yeah.”

The clearing is small, about ten paces across at its widest point, and in the center of the clearing is a shallow pit surrounded by a circle of stones. The ground here is trodden down, hard from the impact of many footsteps, but overlaid with layers of dead leaves and twigs. Kihyun makes quick work of checking the perimeter, more out of habit than anything, before coming to meet Changkyun in the center. They stand over the pit, looking down into its blackened depths.

"People camped here," Changkyun says.

"For a short time," Kihyun agrees. "There are markings on one of the trees here. A tally of the time spent. If they stayed, it was no more than a couple of days."

Changkyun crosses his arms, looking up through the canopy of leaves overhead. It's cooler here in the woods, and quiet. "I wonder why they camped out here when the hospital was so close?"

"Maybe the hospital wasn't safe," Kihyun guesses. "Maybe they were trying to get away."

"From what?"

"I learned about the Fallout at the facility. Jooheon mentioned this place has been a shelter since then, didn't he? But that was decades ago. These marks are fresher. A couple of months, maybe. I think that something may have happened a few months ago, here."

Changkyun nods, kicking at the stones making the fire pit with his boot. Yet another thing that doesn't quite add up, but all these things that don't add up are starting to form their own picture. You can still make out the image in the negatives of a photo.

"I really think we have to leave," Changkyun says quietly. A breeze passes through, rustling the leaves as though echoing his whisper. "There's something wrong with this place, with Jooheon, maybe."

Kihyun doesn't react right away. He crosses his arms slowly and regards Changkyun with a fixed, considering stare. "Walk me through what you know," he says.

Changkyun breathes out noisily through his mouth, putting his hands on his hips. "Well. There's nothing keeping us -- you -- here. They removed your tracker on the first day. And the lack of contact with the outside world is starting to freak me out. I need to talk to Minhyuk, to show him we're alive and to make sure he's okay. There's also the fact that -- and this is the ringer, really -- that Jooheon told me he wants to keep you here under observation and make you into another lab rat to, to heal the world, or something. He seems to think he can do it better than at the facility, treat you better, I don't know, but the way he talks about you, about the research -- I don't trust him. And I can't be a part of that, or do that to you. You don't deserve that."

He doesn't tell Kihyun the other part that Jooheon said, the part about how he thinks Kihyun is under Changkyun's thumb, how he thinks Kihyun would do anything Changkyun wanted. He isn't ready to hear it yet. Changkyun thinks maybe he'd do just about anything Kihyun wanted too, if only Kihyun would ever tell him what he wanted.

Kihyun's shoulders rise and fall steadily as he stares at Changkyun, eyes slightly narrowed. He tilts his head to the side as Changkyun gnaws on his own bottom lip, waiting for a response. Kihyun's eyes are dark, as dark as the charcoal in the pit, and in them Changkyun imagines he can see embers smoldering. "Okay," Kihyun says finally. Changkyun releases the breath he hadn't realized he was holding. "But if we leave, Zhang Tech will be able to find us even without the tracker. They're everywhere."

"I know," Changkyun says bitterly. "I'm still thinking that through."

"You think about that," Kihyun says, "and I'll think about our escape."

Changkyun smirks. "You sure you don't want to leave that to me? I've got the experience, after all. I broke you out before."

Kihyun levels him with a flat, unamused stare. "Before you, my missions were multiple secret political assassinations, and more than once I've stolen from the mob bosses of underground crime rings. I think I'll be okay."

Changkyun chuckles, shrinking back a little bit. He'd almost forgotten where Kihyun came from, almost forgotten his past, what the facility made him do. "Of course, of course," he says.

Kihyun's face softens and he comes around the fire pit to stand before Changkyun. He reaches out and takes Changkyun's wrist, the gesture still so foreign that Changkyun looks down at their hands and finds himself unable to blink. "We'll have to act normal for a couple of days," Kihyun says.

"Normal," Changkyun says, swallowing hard. "Right."

"Where did you leave things with Jooheon?"

Changkyun flushes. "I, uh, kind of ran off. He wanted to me to stay on here for a little while for the research. With you. I told him I'd think about it."

"So think about it for a few more days," Kihyun says. He tugs on Changkyun's wrist and slides his hand down to slot their fingers together.

"What are you doing?" Changkyun asks, watching their hands, mesmerized.

"I don't know," Kihyun admits. "Touching you."

Changkyun flushes, the heat pleasant and tingling across his cheeks. Their hands are just about the same size, Changkyun's just a tiny bit longer, and their palms press together, line against line.

"We should get back to the bunker," Changkyun says, his voice rough and gritty.

A twig snaps somewhere in the woods, close enough for the noise to shatter the silence that sits like a cloud around them. Kihyun's head whips around in the direction of the noise like a hunting dog's.

Changkyun squeezes his hand, turning in the same direction. "What is it?"

"Shownu," Kihyun says. His voice has dropped an octave, and it makes a shiver snake down Changkyun's spine. "He's close. He's been following me."

"Why?"

"I've never been able to shake him completely," Kihyun says, the tone of his voice equal parts longing and resentful, his grip on Changkyun's hand so tight that it's bordering on painful.

"Let's go." He urges Kihyun to look at him instead, reminding himself to ask more about Shownu later, when they're not at risk of being found. "Kihyun? Let's go back the bunker. We'll lay low. We'll plan. And then we'll get out of here."

They leave the clearing behind. It's not until they reach the door to the bunker that Changkyun realizes they're still holding hands.

.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! Kudos and comments greatly appreciated <3
> 
> I’m also on Twitter @andnowforyaya please come talk to me


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